Has anyone thought of going to ThinkorSwim and using their Thinkpipes professional platform??? I believe they clear Penson Financial.
Odd how you have one post and its discrediting my information.... Anyway, I am not in the meeting rooms with Assent and the new buyer, but I do have good relationships with Assent and provide whatever info I can because at the end of the day we are all in the same boat, right? Your information on writing a new system and data handlers is all general BS. Feed handlers can be built in 1 day, what can not be built in one day is the ability to process requests from multiple clients while also servicing those clients with real-time data. The master-remote server logic is not simple, just ask NYSE, NSDQ and ARCA. All of these venues moved to multicast distribution, do you know why? Do you know why all of the B/Ds out there DO NOT use Multicast, but instead use TCP? The real answer is complicated, the short answer is because they simply can not deal with multiple clients connecting at different bandwidths, different hardware, etc and reliably service each client at the same level. Perhaps you are just getting yourself ready for this "new" system, which BTW is actually a remake of a system from 1995 called BullDog. The real aspects of that system should be ready about this time next year, until then you can enjoy the dog and pony show and all the pretty demo's and screen shots you can handle. I want to watch it trade, still waiting on a response for when it will be able to do that. Do I think the old owners will have a new system in a few months, ABSOLUTELY. However, the features and functionality will be nowhere close to even REDI. I would guess their support will be lights out too, with only 2 developers in house. Hopefully they dont have any busy "bus routes" in front of their office The developer who used to work for me DID NOT work on all elements of the trading system, though he was quite the guru. He hasnt worked on Anvil in over a year, he was purely focused on market data servers and client black-boxes. Feel free to contact the head of Software over there, or let me guess, he also doesnt have a clue?!?!? Most of the info I get comes from the technology side at Assent, not the random traders who read posts like yours and spread the bad word around
I agree and I found the support team of lightspeed to be very difficult and unresponsive in dealing with them. Some functionalities that they told me were not possible, I ended up figuring out on my own. Also, the process of borrowing securities from the lending desk was somewhat archaic if you ask me.
Interactive Brokers is a way better direct access broker. Their borrowing is built into their platform so when you place a sell order for a position you don't own it automatically codes it as a short sell and borrows the shares automatically. Their system is very reliable in the most volatile of markets and commissions in the unbundled structure for stocks is extremely low (as low as 1/10th penny per share if you are at the highest volume tier), see http://www.interactivebrokers.com/en/p.php?f=commission To open an account just click on this link for their newly developed online application, it only takes 5 minutes to go through and it can be done completely online: https://www.interactivebrokers.com/Universal/servlet/formWelcome?p=100&atype=IT&ibsrp=139