Testimonials

“For over a dozen years we have relied on the backend technology of NxCore – now powered by financial data from QUODD – to deliver real-time low latency stock and option price quotes to our demanding customer base. Bottom line, IT WORKS day in day out. The elegant data compression algorithm developed by their team remains the Best of Breed solution for an ever-expanding demand, especially in the options market. Choosing NxCore has proven to be a great decision for us, I highly recommend them.”

“I’ve been in the business for 17 years mainly doing arbitrage type trading. It has always been a major ongoing issue getting a reliable data feed at a decent price. Over this time I have used just about every product on the market, and since I found NxCore the issues have faded away. Not only do I not need the T1 lines anymore but I can reliably receive data via an internet connection and easily compete in the arbitrage market. I would highly recommend this service to anyone.”

“The system you’ve created is very impressive! I’m already developing on it for a Federal government agency and am looking forward to analyzing the market feed in the coming weeks.”

“In today’s marketplace, there is no room for error, data omission, latency or excuses when it comes to market data. After we had been a customer of Hyperfeed for five years and S&P Comstock for two, I had come to the realization that to get market data “right”, I was going to have to do it myself. Our troubles with Hyperfeed and Comstock were nothing short of endless. Technology shortcomings, database misconfigurations, data losses and endless excuses. Six months into a project to build our own ticker processing plant for SIAC and OPRA feeds I somewhat accidentally ran into Nanex and NxCore. It took nothing more than a one week evaluation of NxCore for us to make the decision to terminate the new ticker plant development efforts and to make a full commitment to NxCore. This is a decision that could not have turned out better. Our trading precision has grown significantly, profits have grown and NxCore is the foundation of our data requirements. Every representation made of NxCore is flawlessly accurate. Without a doubt, Eric Hunsader is a visionary in the market data software field and has created the most useful, reliable and completely well thought out ticker plant in the industry. You can consider the rest, but choose only the best – NxCore. “

“I have been in the financial markets for over 20 years. I have tried all kinds of software and data products. Just like everything else in the marketplace the “sales pitch” is usually far from the actual experience. There are other testimonials about NxCore and how wonderful the data feed is and how easy it is to use (I was up and running in a couple of days). I agree with everything “technical” that you can read in all the other testimonials – NxCore, as a product, is truly amazing. However, it is my expectation that something that is advertised to work – WILL WORK – AND will work as advertised. Obviously, NxCore works as advertised. BUT, where NxCore is vastly differently from “the rest” is their customer service AFTER the sale. I have had my share of issues (all except one were my errors), but each time I contacted Eric for help he accommodated me quickly, efficiently and “happily” – even when I had made some stupid mistakes in my software and blamed the NxCore product. (Which is what all programmers do right? “It can’t be my software!!!”) Nanex’s commitment to supporting me on an ongoing basis is just as important to me as the quality of their product. Thank you Nanex for your “cutting edge technology” and your “very old-fashioned customer service”.”

“I have been using continuous data feeds since 1995. I started with BMI and then changed to Hyperfeed. In mid 2004, Hyperfeed notified me that by the end of the year it would take 3 dedicated T1’s bundled together to supply me with the data I was receiving and that they expected the requirements to double in time. Fortunately Eric was beginning to test his new Nanex product NxCore. I tested it and found that not only did it broadcast the same continuous data that I was receiving, but it also created a large daily file that I could do detailed time and sales studies against and it all came over the internet!”

“I switched from Hyperfeed / Comstock about this time last year to NxCore. NxCore offers state of the art design, function, and reliability that does not exist in other products in the marketplace. The service has been outstanding. The product design is excellent, the support from Eric Hunsader is without parallel, and the accuracy of the data is the best I have seen.”

“I have used a number of data feeds, including Hyperfeed. The NxCore API is by far the easiest to use and the NxCore data feed is by far the fastest, the most complete and the most robust. But best of all the entire NxCore data feed, including bbo options, is easily delivered over a 3mbps internet connection. NxCore requires nothing more than a cable modem and a modest P.C. to receive the entire US equitity and option market.”

“Over my 15 years plus of trading experience, I’ve used several different data feeds and charting applications. .. [Click here to read the full text] .. In summary, the bottom line is that my trading profits have increased dramatically over the last year and a half and I attribute a great deal of that to the use of NxCore Hot List data and the capabilities it provides.”

I LIKED IT SO MUCH I WENT TO WORK FOR ERIC!!!
“I am a developer who has been writing applications for the financial markets since 1986. I am not a trader. Trading would distract me. I write applications for professional traders and they pay me extremely well to do so. Since 1986, I have coded for almost every imaginable ticker plant – feed stream – api system known….From the early DTN cable boxes, ESignal boxes, PCQuote Satellite systems, Hyperfeed and Comstock servers, Quote.Com, Spryware servers and more (hey it’s been 20 years I’ve probably forgotten a few). I have also spent many years in the trenches of real-time 3d graphics programming and have honed a variety of optimization skills which are equally applicable to coding for financial markets. I have worked (as a contractor) for numerous Fortune 500 companies as a senior developer and have in the past found enough time to have several technical articles/books published. I tell you this so that you may know where my experience lies how to better interpret my views.

I have only recently been made aware of NxCore (March 2007) and what I can tell you right up front is that, quite simply, NxCore is by far the most powerful and robust piece of Ticker Plant software I have come across in my coding career. Regarding the speed and throughput of the actual NxCore application and data stream, I’m going to keep this simple and tell you that it is everything it is advertised to be and more. For the first time in a long time (in my career) the software is exactly what it claims to be. Read the spec sheet from Nanex….it is 100% accurate.

As for coding NxCore, the problem is really where to start? The structures are the cleanest I have seen in ticker plant software. Easy to understand, easy to access and every data type has been thought through completely. Say goodbye to string compares entirely for symbol lookup with several mechanisms ready for you to utilize for lightning fast access and issue lookups. Say hello to having data for the ENTIRE market ready to access immediately. And say hello (maybe for the first time) to consistency within a system that has been thought through from every angle.

NxCore is fundamentally different than other applications of the same nature. I strongly urge you to read through the documentation and tutorials. By doing so you will quickly come to grips with the NxCore philosophy and once you do, lights start going off and you can say goodbye to any social life for awhile. Additionally, I strongly urge you to spend time with the Viewer that is imbedded in the actual NxCore application. This viewer is one of the most powerful tools for learning the data structures and event flow of NxCore. Expand everything, become knowledgeable on the filters and step modes. There is a wealth of knowledge for you in the Viewer

If you have been (or are) developing applications for financial markets, how many times have you wished for a replay server? With NxCore this is an inherent feature of the software. Ready for the replay server of your dreams? Read on…

Want to know where bottlenecks in your applications might lie or how responsive it will remain with increased volume levels? With NxCore’s tape playback you have the ability to push an entire days tape through an application in approx 10 minutes (or less depending on your machines performance). Try your application while pushing a tape down it’s throat at full throttle. If it app can remain responsive during this playback you’re golden in real time.

Want to pinpoint exactly what your application processes and when? With a couple lines of coding this is a trivial task to do in NxCore. Step through the trading tape one message at a time and make those determinations with ease.

Wish you could work during off market hours? Ok this may be a curse to some (your wife and kids may never see you again) but if you love the work (as I do), having the ability to utilize real market data during off-market hours is a godsend. By far the easiest way to boost productivity is to increase the amount of hours you have to work, or to have the ability to work when inspiration hits. With NxCore make that 24×7.

How about installations on client sites? The amount of time it takes to set up NxCore on a single machine is approx. one minute. The amount of time to set up a multicasting configuration is about 2 minutes (if you’re slow). While there are a number of options for configuration (like where to save daily tapes etc) NxCore runs perfect straight from installation. I have spent days trying to properly configure other Ticker Plant software that is less sophisticated than NxCore and to Eric the author I would just like to say “Thank You!”

My final comment regarding NxCore is that I almost don’t want to tell you about it. You heard me. With NxCore I have an edge that other developers do not (several actually) and it has become my “secret weapon” so to speak. By telling you of NxCore and giving you this gift, I expect you to send me royalties on all your future applications. Thanks!”

“I want to thank Nanex and Eric Hunsader for providing the trade and quote data for the options and their underlying stocks. I use these data in my doctorate thesis at UIUC which can be found at SSRN (http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1963865). I thank Nanex in the acknowledgment section of the paper, but I decided to also send you this e-mail. Nanex gave the data to my advisor Neil Pearson and John Broussard several years ago, and this is the second paper which uses it. The quality of the data is amazing which significantly simplifies programming and doing research.”

“Making sure that we are getting a “complete picture” of the day’s trading activity is an essential requirement for our “black box” application and website development efforts. NxCore made that possible and they did 90% of the work for us. Using the NxCore data API’s and the provided application programming templates, we were accessing the core real-time data we needed within 2 days of starting our development. If you need a complete market data feed with a powerful yet easy-to-use data API, there is simply nothing else comparable to NxCore. With other market data providers, if your data link goes down you have lost that market data forever. With NxCore we did not lose a single trade or quote message when our ISP recently experienced a major fiber outage. When the ISP connection came back up after the hour long outage, NxCore automatically downloaded the missed data and our application servers we were back running normally within 8 minutes. We didn’t even have to restart a single application. For us NxCore was simply the only product that could meet our need for complete market data access over the Internet with an easy-to-use yet powerful data API.”

“I’ve been working in software development for the financial industry for over 15 years, both for European and US markets. There were many data feeds protocols and APIs passing through my dev environment, starting with market data received through TV teletext service and satellite antennas and continuing with the Internet feeds that are so common now. I’ve developed on almost every single datafeed in United States; Sungard, Comstock, Tenfore/Morningstar, Quote.com, eSignal, IQFeed, Hyperfeed, Activ Financial are the ones I can recall. I remember reading hundreds of pages of documentation sometimes spread in three or even more separate documents, with tens of appendixes and tables. I remember trying to navigate through the mess of DLLs and EXEs that some of them provided as part of their API. I remember trying to understand their sample apps, some of them including ten or more source and header files. If you don’t wish to have memories such as these (many times accompanied by frustration) and you wish to have unlimited data passing through your dev environment – NxCore is for you.

My first experience was during the installation. I ran NxCore Setup and it finished a second after I clicked the install button. To be honest, I was initially thinking something went wrong and the installation silently failed – I couldn’t believe it actually installed a very powerful engine. My next experience was running it: it was running in 10MB of memory, not moving one byte more or less, and consuming zero CPU, while downloading and streaming the whole US stock and futures market on my desktop computer over a regular internet connection!

I wasn’t surprised anymore when I saw that the documentation and the samples were incredible simple and straight forward. I was able to connect to the stream and process trades and quotes in my application within a half hour of coding – but this time I just expected it: after seeing how it installs, how it runs, and how incredible simple everything is, it was just it’s natural flow. While coding my applications, many times I’ve thought to myself “it would be great if NxCore would provided this…” …and bang!, after checking the documentation more carefully, it was already there! The NxCore access component and APIs are not only super-optimized, but were designed with always having in mind how the developers using it can optimize their code too. Forget about lookups through collections and dynamic memory allocation, which are killers for a real-time application: if you use NxCore at its full capacity, you don’t need even one single lookup, nor allocating one single byte of memory for an entire, 24-hour market day.

An impressive and extremely helpful feature is the ability to replay a specific market day. Imagine that you have an application that crashed in production, malfunctioned or underperformed during a certain period of a hectic market day. Normally you would have to spend a lot of time to investigate the issue by inspecting log files and crash reports and detecting the cause (if you’re lucky). Too many times however the developer is left to guess the problem, attempt a fix and wait for another similar event to occur – and we know that exact same event will never occur. This is not the case if you run NxCore. You can replay that specific market day in QA how many times you want, until you recreate and fix the real problem.

I’m totally impressed by how much this small component can do. Never have I seen such simplicity and such power delivered with such a small footprint and using so few resources. It has been a pleasure and a privilege to use NxCore.”

“After over a year of service from ESignal I decided to switch to NxCore. I have now been using NxCore for almost a year and to date I have found their service to be far superior in every conceivable dimension. Their servers run with fewer interruptions. Their software is far more robust. The API is significantly more intuitive to work with and the brilliant interface to the data eleminates costly look-up times. The tech support is unparalleled for any industry. Eric Hunsader offers friendly and extremely competant support beyond all expectations. Still further, NxCore has redefined low latency data delivery. Their proprietary data compression format makes it possible to deliver an enormous amount of data via cable modem with virually no lag! NxCore offers a superior real-time data feed solution appropriate for anyone – from the largest institutions to smallest in house operation. I highly recommend this product for anyone looking for a reliable data feed solution.”

“This is a super-premium feed. It has some extraordinary features.

NxCore is a full broadcast internet feed. You get every instrument of every exchange you’re permissioned for. You get every single tick for every instrument, delivered in real-time. Data compression is unparalleled. I get all instruments on NYSE, AMEX, NASDAQ, CME, CBOT. I get trades only (I don’t use bid-ask data). During regular market hours, the bandwidth requirement is about 30-40 kbps. If bid-ask is wanted as well, the bandwidth requirement is multiplied by a factor of about 10. The data server is designed to run all the time, in the background. (However, you can turn your computer off. When you turn it on again, it will “catch up” almost immediately). It’s fairly invisible, unless you want to interact with it. Normally, it just takes care of itself. Processing all of those ticks during RTH takes about 1% of processor time on my creaky Athlon 64 3200+. (I’m waiting for the quad-core chips to upgrade).

NxCore is indestructible. If there’s any disruption for any reason (power failure, ISP failure, whatever), NxCore will backfill automatically when the situation is corrected. And it’ll do it very quickly. During my trial period, I tried every kind of abuse I could think of, including a product update during RTH, intentional destruction of files, etc. NxCore corrected every situation.

The datafeed includes some very interesting things. Every trade is accompanied by a statistical analysis that results in a decision to use or filter that tick. Thus, you can scrub the ticks or not (your choice). If you think you can use the statistical data more effectively, you’re given all of the components to use as you wish. The analysis is a server-side process.

Symbols are handled very intelligently. At the start of every calendar day (shortly after midnight Eastern), there’s a “symbol spin” that enumerates every symbol of every exchange you’re entitled to that was encountered the previous trading day. You can use this to check the validity of the symbols you’re following. You also have the ability to build your data structures and embed indexes into NxCore, which allows you to access the appropriate entry when ticks occur with no overhead. In addition, every exchange sends Change notices before 0530 Eastern, so that name changes, new issues, etc. are also iterated before RTH. This can be used to eliminate ugly surprises that may have been missed in trying to keep up with a large universe of instruments.

Each trading day is packaged as a “tape” file. You can set up NxCore to automatically archive a copy of each tape wherever you like. I keep a large USB drive for tape archive backup.

NxCore comes with useful diagnostic tools and an online chat function to tech support. You’ll end up connected to Eric Hunsader, the developer himself and a guy who’s been around the block in trading software. There isn’t any problem he can’t solve fairly immediately. In addition, there’s a slick tool known simply as the “Viewer.” You can essentially set up break points when viewing tapes for situations you’re interested in and see the contents of the various data structures. This is very useful for getting fairly immediate gratification for answers to questions you may have about how things are done in the datafeed.

There may be differences depending on subscription; I always have access to the last month’s worth of data on the server. I tried deleting a tape file from a couple of weeks ago; it was replaced by the server automatically.

Historical tapes are available for purchase. I got a running start by buying 4 months of tapes, got the previous month on the server, and have been running for 2 months. Thus, I currently have 7 months of absolutely pristine tick data for the exchanges I’m interested in following. I believe the historical data available goes back about 2 1/2 years.

When you get the free trial (which requires signing an NDA), you get full disclosure and all of the software. The API is very logical, very straightforward, very simple and documented well. There are also excellent examples. The API is written in ‘C’; there’s a single #include file. There’s a C++ wrapper, a CSharp wrapper and a Delphi wrapper. It can be easily accessed from VB. The free trial will run in real-time. If you’re a quick learner, you can write a fully functioning interface while the trial is active. If you’re a little slower, you can still use the historical tapes you’ll end up with. Thus, you can REALLY check out the product without sending a3 dime to DTN.

The processing of historical tapes and the real-time feed is identical. One code set will do it all. For my application, the interface is just a few pages of C++ code.

You can have multiple applications that access NxCore simultaneously. Thus, if you’re running multiple copies of NSDT, each can access NxCore. They won’t interfere with one another. Also, you won’t open up separate internet connections. You already have the whole feed in the real-time buffers. NxCore will give you as many independent accesses as you require. You can also access historical tapes at the same time.

I sort of knew about this feed a year and a half ago. When Quote.com was acquired by Interactive Data, I knew it was time to look for a serious alternative. When I saw the demo in action, I was hooked.

This feed is HIGHLY recommended. There’s nothing else like it. (I make that statement with the historical perspective of having used the old Universal Market Data Server and M3 with Comstock, E-Signal with its ActiveX API, Quote.com with its API). “