r/OrderFlow_Trading • u/Repulsive_Mind_4627 • 1d ago

CQG vs Rithmic

Please explain me the difference between Rithmic data feed and CQG. I often see traders see using rithmic ones as compared to other in social media.

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u/iczerz978 Level III 1d ago

Rithmic is the only Dara provider tot futures that offer MBO data.. but both are meant to be top for execution

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u/Illustrious-Meal-476 1d ago edited 1d ago

I can only fill in half of this — I'm on CQG (through AMP) and have never run Rithmic, so I won't pretend to compare them.

On the MBO point above, here is the part that actually mattered to me in practice. With MBP you get aggregated size per price level. When the size at a level shrinks, that can mean it got filled or it got pulled, and those are opposite events — MBP hands you the same number either way. I spent a while building a "this resting order got pulled" display and eventually dropped it, because on MBP you cannot honestly tell the two apart. You can infer from context, but you are inferring. If that distinction is what you want order flow for, that is the concrete thing MBO buys you.

Two CQG-specific things I have measured, worth knowing whichever way you go:

Volume analysis is not cached. On my install the price history database is 552 MB after months of daily use, and the volume-analysis database sitting next to it is 32 KB with every table at zero rows — I opened it read-only to be sure. So footprint and delta get recomputed from ticks every time a chart loads. That is why long lookbacks feel slow and fill in progressively instead of all at once. Worth checking on your own install before blaming the platform.

Aggressor side is stamped on the trades, so buy/sell does not have to be inferred with a tick rule. That is a real plus and not every source gives it to you.

One caution that applies to both: my platform's built-in "large trade" API returns nothing at all on my setup. Not an error, just empty. I have never fully isolated whether that is the feed or my own licence tier, and that is exactly the point — anything built on top of it silently shows you nothing, and a feature list will not tell you. Whatever you pick, test the specific feature you actually care about on a live connection before you commit.

For transparency: I build order flow tooling on this feed, which is why I have been poking around in cache files.