Right now I'm using Scottrade Elite (I have a daytrader acct) and don't really like it..But I want to keep my Scottrade acct Thinking of trying E-Signal or ? Any thoughts out there? Thanks, Eddie
Scottrade elite was my first platform; I got out of that very fast. If you're switching to a new platform, you're best bet is to try a number of them. You can try tradestation, thinkorswim, esignal and ninjatrader/multicharts (to some extent) for free. This of course assumes that you don't care specifically about the broker or rates, etc. Most of those platforms are going to be about the same; some have strengths in some areas rather than others. So, just spend some time trying each out and see what you like.
I personally use the combination of Interactive Brokers (using Ninja Trader as the charting package) and TradeStation. Ninja Trader costs you about $50/month for real-time. For equities you will also need to get a data provider for an additional $50/month In TradeStation, you can get the platform fee of $99 a month waived if you trade 5000 shares (easily done if you day trade some low priced stocks). One warning though, if you day trade you must keep you account balance above $25K.
It depends what kind of trading you do. I find eSignal very easy to set up with my custom formulas and spread charts to monitor what's going on and it has pages that perform great, never lock up etc. It's pretty versatile and I recommend it in terms of information display. A few times during high volumes the tickers started to lag by a few seconds but a restart fixes that, otherwise no problems. I also like the visual interface and the key shortcuts. Good experience overall.
To clarify, NinjaTrader is completely free to use with the exclusion of sending live orders to your broker...You have to pay for live trading.
Correct me if I am wrong, but Ninja Trader is only completely free for end of day data. Also, I would note that you can use Interactive Brokers as your data provider. However, IB does not store historical tick data. This was the reason I opted to start paying for a data provider service.
Yes, you are wrong. NinjaTrader is free for both intraday and EOD data. In fact, we even provide free EOD data courtest of www.kinetick.com.