For the second Sunday in a row (and perhaps the eighth in the last half year), Forex quotes simply disappear on late Sunday night/early Monday morning. As I write this (Monday 8:20 AM, Eastern time) they are still "down."

No data is returned when I try to watch a forex symbol (I get bid and ask of 0.0000). When I try to request historical data (minute, daily, whatever) I am told: "Unable to load historical data file."

All other kinds of symbols (non-forex) work fine. Later in the day, Forex will return (it always does) without explanation, and without my changing my software.

I have written about this before, but never gotten a staisfactory resolution. Can someone from DTN *please* look into this for me? I am using IQConnect Version: 3.5.0.5, Mercury Version 2.51.4.

Matthew

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Matthew Klein

Forex per se is not down. The barclays feed is down currently. This is an issue at our source, and we are talking to them to get it resolved. The HotSpotFXi Forex feed is fully operational.

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Jay Froscheiser
DTN - Trading Markets

Jay:

Thanks for the fast response. At the risk of sounding like a difficult customer, I'd like to say a few things in response.

(1) Since Barclays provides one set of forex quotes, and Hotspot another -- it's not really helpful to say that forex quotes are not down per se. For the quotes I need, they are down. There is no alternative to Barclays. I'm not sure what I am expected to do.

(2) Most important: this happens all the time. It seems to happen on Sunday night/Monday morning usually, but not always. Sometimes it happens late at night during the week. We're not talking about once every year (the kind of frequency one would find acceptable from a quote vendor). We're talking many times each month. How can a person trade, and put money at stake, when quotes just "disappear" for long periods of time? It's crazy.

(3) Forgive me, again, but it seems like there is no recognition from DTN that this is a serious problem. I've noted this problem several times via email to DTN, and basically I get the response that I am doing something wrong.

(4) Is there any plan to resolve this? I'm a technical person. Can you give me some more technical details about the nature of your problem? What do you mean, concretely, when you say Barclays is "down?" Did someone at DTN accidentally kick an Ethernet cable out of a switch? Did a dedicated Barclays server at DTN facilities crash? Does Barclays simply stop transmitting quotes to *all its resellers*? Based on the answer to this question, perhaps you can tell me what sort of plan DTN has to make this happen less frequently in the future? One possible answer is to jettison Barclays, and go somewhere else. I guess I'm looking for a little comfort that someone at DTN recognizes this is a really serious problem and that there is some sort of plan to solve it.

(5) A minor thing, but: can you please create some sort of "status" page on the web? If you know Barclays quotes are down, why not have an easily-accessible page that says so, and that reports on the status of various feeds?

I apologize if my frustration is showing, but it seems like this problem never goes away. My fantasy, I suppose, is that someone from DTN reads this post, and says, "Yes it is a problem, and here is what we plan to do to solve it...."

Matthew

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Matthew Klein

Matthew,

We take any and all outages seriously. In the case of 3rd party provided content, some things are out of our control. If the CME stops sending us data, unfortunately, we cannot get it to you. Luckily, that happens very rarely. In the case of Barclays, they obviously don't have the same infrastructure, and thus, we seem to have more issues with their feed.

We are indeed looking at some other forex feeds. We already have one other available (HotSpot).

As for the status page, we have one available at http://www.dtniq.com/product/motd/motd2.cfm. Click on the RED ball at the top to see the notice regarding Barclays.

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Jay Froscheiser
DTN - Trading Markets