Your Real-Time Data Source Goes Down - Now What?
By Dave Mabe
Yesterday, the IQFeed had a significant outage for an extended period.
This is a pretty rare occurrence - in fact, I don't remember the last time this happened.
When I asked my contact there about it, here's how he responded:
One of the Chicago data centers had a power outage coupled with an internet connectivity issue. Haven't seen that in a long time but it’s being worked on and we should know soon.
Things appear to be back to normal now, but they still haven't updated their system status page as of the time I'm composing this:
Outages are a thing, and you can't pretend they won't happen.
It's tempting to get mad at the provider, but situations like these are a reminder that nobody cares more about your trading than you do.
Ultimately, you are the CEO of your trading, and there's no one to escalate to.
And, therefore, it's your responsibility to have a plan when things inevitably break.
The right way to think about this incident was that your trading business had an outage.
Just as an outage at any firm is a valuable learning opportunity, so too are these. Use them as such.
Here's a list of things to do to turn outages into positive ways to get better:
When did you discover the issue? Could you have known earlier? How?
Can you create automated alerting to let you know when this occurs next time?
What backups could you switchover to during the next outage?
As frustrating as situations like this can be, it's much better to treat them as the world forcing you to think about how you can get better.
My daughter works for Google, and they have an excellent way to think about outages.
Every outage at Google is "no-fault" - that is, no particular person "caused" the outage.
The system caused the outage.
This encourages a productive, all-hands-on-deck response to improve the overall system, rather than assigning blame.
Apply this same attitude to your own trading business.
Tomorrow, I'll review several workarounds for the data feed outage from yesterday.
-Dave
P.S. Are you in a drawdown and ready to quit? Join the other traders who reversed their drawdowns and are printing money with MabeKit. Get Instant Access