eSignal 7.3
My experience with eSignal 7.3 over the trial period was tantalising, and on balance frustrating. Hence the high scores for User Interface and Features, combined with low scores for everything else.
I took the service because it provides seamless coverage of all markets that I am interested in, together with a very full suite of technical charting tools. To the extent that these things were indeed provided, I got what I was looking for. There are limitations. For instance, the market scanner tools apparently do not extend to UK stocks, so I was unable to automate my evaluations in the UK market. There is no real functionality for testing trading systems.
I had real problems with reliability.
After a few days I began to notice that the data used by the Advanced Charts had gaps in it, of a few days or a few hours. The charting software sometimes indicated the gaps - for instance if a couple of bars dropped out, there would be an empty space. For longer gaps, however, the chart would simply excise the missing time periods from the x- axis. In a system where charting tools are being applied to generate trading signals, this was potentially very dangerous; for instance, the Advanced GET "XTL" indicator applied itself quite happily to a series of 60-minute bars which had a 3-day gap in the middle, generating visually plausible but financially meaningless (and dangerous) results. The gaps persisted from session to session, and day to day, for a number of days, then cleared up "spontaneously".
The dropping out of data appeared to be associated with a tendency of the eSignal Data Manager to go into a "hung" state, without any system warning. Applications that go into a temporarily hung state, without explicit indication, present a specially pernicious kind of unreliability (imagine an air-traffic control system which behaved like that).
When I contacted eSignal technical support to deal with this (specifically, to give me guidance on the problem of data gaps) they took about three days to come up with the answer that they had been unable to reproduce the problem. None of the diagnostic tests they asked me to perform revealed anything: I still got the same data-errors in all the experimental conditions they suggested. After an extended support experience - several days of emailing of screen dumps and several telephone calls later - no solution had been provided. Just when all seemed completely hopeless, the missing data mysteriously reappeared, but without any explanation for the problems.
As soon as the data-gaps had cured themselves, the whole eSignal system went down for some hours, leading to a complete absence of market coverage. This did not impress.
Thereafter I confined my use of the system to an early morning check of potential trades for the day, in circumstances where there were no other applications running, and no incoming prices. Even in these apparently ideal conditions, the application was not reliable. When it hung one morning for the third or fourth time I gave up. (I should say this all took place on a good broadband connection, on a fast new pc which runs lots of other applications without a glitch)