Many people approach support asking about recommended data sources, books, hardware, etc. If you want to help new users post your recommendations in this topic.
From my side I can recommend:
Got new i7-8700K today 
- this little beast is really snappy.
Hi Tomasz,
i am new to amibroker and whenever i open charts and apply MA/EMA adefault paramet of 15 shows up. I even tried editing the formula but didnt work. Also when I apply 3 MAs as overlay on the chart they all end up showing the same parameter even after changing them. Surely, I am missing things but didnt know where else to show up.
Thanks a ton in advance.
P.S.: I am not new to trading(8 yrs exp)
I am looking for EOD equities data and despite Tomasz's recommendataion Norgate is limited to Aussie and US stocks.
I am looking at TC2000. Is anyone using them ? Is it any good ? reliability and coverage wise
I have not used TC2000 for several years, and when I did it was only for US stocks. Therefore, my experience may not be terribly relevant to your question. However, I had two issues with TC2000:
Thank you for your reply.
I am planning on using it to scan for daily opportunities. I see that TC2000 provides 100k stocks data and I would imagine I will probably scan across 20k of them everyday. Can you give me some idea of performance issues that may have ?
I understand you only used for US stocks but what were non-US stock data quality like if you can recall ?
Thanks.
@trunda I think that the 100K++number on the TC2000 site is misleading: as far as I know, they refer to USA and Canada stocks + mutual funds + options contracts (this is where you have a huge number of different entries) that you can trade via their brokerage.
Moreover, to use TC2000 with AmiBroker you have to install the OLD desktop-based version 7.0 (a lot more limited feature version).
Like many other nonnative DB, performance is significantly slower (at least until AmiBroker has not yet cached the required data in memory). Maybe that for EOD scanning it will be OK, but I will not choose it for heavy tasks (in such a case is better to use directly their user interface if your criteria can be coded there.... frequently not an easy job!).
If they still offer a trial, IMHO, the best thing to do is to test it and see if it is ok for your needs.
By the way, I too would like to find a reliable "global" data provider. Intrinio has almost any EOD stock exchange around the world available also for individual investors, but costs will add up fast!
I doubt that you will have performance issues specific to TC2000. The performance of your scan is more likely to be affected by the technical specs of the PC you're using, the number of symbols in your watch list, and the quality of the AFL that you write.
I only subscribed to US Stock data, so have no opinion on trading instruments from other markets.
Should the best desktop CPU be updated to one of the Intel i9 CPUs today? Any reason why the best desktop CPU is still i7? Is it for price reason?
i9 is too expensive for what it offers. i7 8700K provides more bang for buck and AMD Ryzens too.
Talking about bang for buck, the AMD Ryzen 7 2700x seem more value for money than i7 8700k. I started a topic to ask for feedback from the community regarding this CPU on Amibroker.
I can do some tests on Ryzen 5 2400G (4 core / 8 threads) if you are interested.
Thank you very much for the offer. Some tests on Ryzen chips would be helpful. My concern as a user is whether there are side effects that Ryzen chips have when working with Amibroker. If there are no problems with Ryzen 5, most probably there will not be any problems with Ryzen 7.
@thankyou18 I don't have Ryzen, so I can't help you, but some time ago I have asked Tomasz about the new Ryzen family. You can find information regarding some differences between Intel and AMD processors, CPU's in general and overall performance also in this thread:
Yes, but back then (when I was writing that post) I did not have access to any Ryzen based computer, but now I have one so I can actually run some tests.
First tests show that Ryzen 5 2400G performs really, really well. This is individual optimization test with acos/log functions (http://www.amibroker.com/kb/2017/10/06/limits-of-multithreading/)
| CPU | Threads | Total time [sec] |
|---|---|---|
| Multi thread performance | ||
| Intel i7 8700K | 12 | 3.72 |
| Intel i7 8700K | 8* | 5.19 |
| AMD Ryzen 5 2400G | 8 | 4.62 |
| Single thread performance | ||
| Intel i7 8700K | 1** | 23.90 |
| AMD Ryzen 5 2400G | 1** | 24.64 |
Notes:
Shorter time - better
* when number of threads is artificially limited to 8 using #pragma maxthread 8
** when number of threads is artificially limited to 1 using #pragma maxthread 1
Tests were done using 32-bit version of AmiBroker (so they both use same "old" x87 instructions). 64-bit version is (significantly) faster due to SSE2/SSE3 usage and newer/better compiler.
As you can see obviously 6 core / 12 thread i7 8700K wins, because it uses more cores, but when the number of threads is limited to 8, Ryzen actually wins.
As to single-thread performance they are pretty much equal in running optimization.
So I am actually surprised how well AMD performs. I will need to do more tests, but initial impression is very good.
It is worth noting that Ryzen 5 2400G costs less than half of i7 8700K price. AMD apparently did a great job this time.
Thanks for the good news and testing effort, Tomasz. Will a separate installation file for Amibroker be necessary since AMD Ryzen uses another compiler?
AMD Ryzen vs Intel i7 = Amibroker vs Metastock
Cheaper and Better. Haha.
It runs the same binary and compiler is the same for both. AMD processors are 100% binary compatible with Intel.
Worden TC data offers only US/CAN quotes. They have cheaper EOD and more costly real time quotes.
Note that only their oldest version offers the ability to use their data for download import into your machine and thus into another program such as Amibroker.
Amibrokers clever design advantage is that they import the all market data transparently into local files, so that every data access does not generate individual downloads from a remote host.
Remember newer Worden products are web based and do not offer data extraction, as everything on your screen has been assembled at their host system.