New screenshots and data feed news

We have added a few new screenshots over here of the last beta. And next week more in-house testing of the latest feature developments begin. Amongst these is the IQFeed subscription service.

ArbMaker is designed to take multiple feeds for two main reasons: backup and reliability. On release the software will work with Yahoo! Finance and, for the US and Canada, IQFeed.

It is known that Yahoo data can contain bugs, including random changes that appear, disappear and then reappear. This is particularly true for non-US data. We found an example on the London Stock Exchange with CTY.L where most of the 2009 price data is occasionally returned as the same number. And occasionally not.

Cointegration results are sensitive to data quality and oddities far less severe than that example will affect the calculations – sometimes materially. It is always worth the trouble of eye-balling the price data for incongruities.

So as part of the insurance against funny data (and data blackouts) in US and Canadian markets we will have IQFeed.

Note, also, that under our agreement with IQ any users referred by us will have the setup fee of $50 waived.