V.15:14 (677-680): Product Review: Unfair Advantage, version 1.54 by John Sweeney

Futures data by subdscription: Unfair Advantage, Version 1.54 (CSI). Worldwide futures data updated by Internet or phone link. by John Sweeney

Diversifying your futures portfolio is tougher to do than it is for equities, where thousands of choices abound. Still, the playing field is expanding, with all the new futures contracts and developing exchanges worldwide. The problem is finding out what’s going on out there and doing so economically. One solution is CSI’s Unfair Advantage, which practically lets you download the world (plus its history).

With Unfair Advantage, you can download end-of-day data via the Internet (provided you have access through an Internet service provider) or modem. It takes three or four minutes or so on a T1 line, thanks to proprietary technology that achieves compression ratios of up to 20 to 1 for the master database held locally, compared with the more typical 2 to 1 squeeze jobs. Building files takes anywhere from a minute to five minutes, depending on how many items you’re actively tracking. You get all the data from yesterday (retransmitted for refresh), corrections for exchange errors and revisions plus any data errors, plus all of today’s data.