I've had an account for years on E-Trade, because they purchased my previous broker years ago and retained my great rates that I had with them. But I haven't tried trading with E-Trade until recently, on their "Pro" platform. I've found it to be a very frustrating, maddening experience. Preparing bracket and conditional orders, making changes, the whole thing, awful. Is it just me and the fact that I've been married to IB's TWS for so long? Or have others had similar experiences with E-Trade.
I trade on etrade pro platform and overall it's ok. However, Lately i started trying out the bracket and conditional orders as well and it is a mess, for some reason you can't link it to the other charts so you have to manually put the stock symbol a few times (in the quote montage and in the order entry several times (i use the one triggers all)). so if i want to go into a trade it takes me 10-15 seconds to enter all the symbols. I called etrade and for some reason they can't help me. very frustrating
How is E-Trade Pro different from E-Trade? We have LS and LS institutional, but there is no difference in the technology offered. There's a different sales force and HF reporting we offer our institutional clients but for the most part, we do offer our "retail" clients a substandard service. Bob
E*TRADE pro is a stand alone trading application for E*TRADE. It offers news services, analytics, account information, market information and trading. (Like tws or the ameritrade version) I haven’t used the news or analytics (as I use my own stuff) but the trading isn’t that bad. It’s easy to enter options orders and stock order. It allows for some simple routing (like to arca). E*TRADE also has a web based options house system which they are developing into their main platform. It’s good for futures and some pnl analysis but overall i don’t really like it.
If you are familiar with TWS, then I would stick with IB. TWS is a far superior product to any E-Trade platforms. The only 'possible' advantage of E-Trade over IB is that their rate structure for equities can be better IF you are trading large size. Their commissions are per-trade, versus IB, which is based on the number of shares traded.
I find one of the best things about using etrade or TWS from IB is if you are trading small cap stocks that are very illiquid you can fire off market orders and get filled with price improvement and staying away from the hft guys. I have traded with lightspeed and takion which are great platforms but if you try to use market orders on those same stocks you will pay through big time, direct access hft guys will rip you up. If lightspeed or takion had routes that would internalize your order flow or trade against you I would trade through them full time. LS has a route LSPT that is cheaper for taking liquidity but you will not get filled a decent size order all in one shot like at IB or etrade.