Dear friend, You are competing against well-funded individuals, plus even better funded small organizations and on top of them extremely well funded large organizations
Each of these competitors is trying to beat you and take your money.
Collectively they spent tens of thousands of hours learning how to trade the markets and thousands of hours learning how to code their algorithmic trading strategies into their expensive computers.
Trust me when I tell you they are not using freely available data download from Yahoo! or Google.
It is a sad fact that none of us want to acknowledge but that's who you are competing against .
When you are just geting introduced to the subject of trading and code writing, using free data to test some preliminary strategies is probably an OK idea. nice to practice with.
But look at Yahoo. They have made at least four or five changes to their service in the last four or five months . Different ways of dealing with splits, dividend adjustments, and just the software and the code required to download these data sets keep changing again and again !!
You are not their customer (you are not paying Yahoo) so they don't communicate these changes with you and they did not give you instructions how to deal with any of these changes . As a smart person you have chosen Amibroker to develop your strategies and Ami's founder has provided AmiQuote to collect data provided by many internet sites. You are lucky that he devotes a lot of time and effort to keep up with the constant mistakes and changes made by idiots at Yahoo and Google (who in their defence are NOT data vendors and are trying to increase their ad revenues by providing some financial quotes for "free"). Yahoo and Google purchase their data from real data vendors, then they try to have their programmers set up web sites that will sell advertising along side these quotes.
Although nothing is perfect in my experience the paid for data vendors will communicate changes to you. They will instruct you how to deal with their improved services. They will take a direct telephone call to handle your questions. They provide service that is much much better than free quotes from Yahoo and Google.
Try picking up your phone and calling Yahoo or Google to talk about problems with the free data ! Good luck with that.
I wish you good fortune on your trading journey, but do not ignore the facts that I have presented to you.
AmiFan
PS I will not mention any data vendors as your choice depends on what markets you are interested in, what time frame, how much historical data you need, what historical data you need etc etc. Luckily for Amibroker users there are usually several to choose from.
Each of these competitors is trying to beat you and take your money.
Collectively they spent tens of thousands of hours learning how to trade the markets and thousands of hours learning how to code their algorithmic trading strategies into their expensive computers.
Trust me when I tell you they are not using freely available data download from Yahoo! or Google.
It is a sad fact that none of us want to acknowledge but that's who you are competing against .
When you are just geting introduced to the subject of trading and code writing, using free data to test some preliminary strategies is probably an OK idea. nice to practice with.
But look at Yahoo. They have made at least four or five changes to their service in the last four or five months . Different ways of dealing with splits, dividend adjustments, and just the software and the code required to download these data sets keep changing again and again !!
You are not their customer (you are not paying Yahoo) so they don't communicate these changes with you and they did not give you instructions how to deal with any of these changes . As a smart person you have chosen Amibroker to develop your strategies and Ami's founder has provided AmiQuote to collect data provided by many internet sites. You are lucky that he devotes a lot of time and effort to keep up with the constant mistakes and changes made by idiots at Yahoo and Google (who in their defence are NOT data vendors and are trying to increase their ad revenues by providing some financial quotes for "free"). Yahoo and Google purchase their data from real data vendors, then they try to have their programmers set up web sites that will sell advertising along side these quotes.
Although nothing is perfect in my experience the paid for data vendors will communicate changes to you. They will instruct you how to deal with their improved services. They will take a direct telephone call to handle your questions. They provide service that is much much better than free quotes from Yahoo and Google.
Try picking up your phone and calling Yahoo or Google to talk about problems with the free data ! Good luck with that.
I wish you good fortune on your trading journey, but do not ignore the facts that I have presented to you.
AmiFan
PS I will not mention any data vendors as your choice depends on what markets you are interested in, what time frame, how much historical data you need, what historical data you need etc etc. Luckily for Amibroker users there are usually several to choose from.