I know there has been a rash of IB bashing on the site lately, but I would take it with a grain of salt. I think their reliability is better than any of the others you are looking at. Where they are lacking is in charts and Level II. In my experience the very best custoemr service and tech assistance is RealTick. Brilliant tech support reps who know the product inside out.
----------- http://www.tradestationsupport.com/whats_new/default.shtm Is where I saw it, there is a video about it. I haven't used it but it sure looks better than the old platform which I have tried. I would like to hear comments from anyone who is using it. The screen can be sized and have many windows with different equities
I mostly trade stocks and options. My trading is around 10 round trades a week atleast, but goes up as i get used to there system. Most brokers charge around .005 or .006 a share . Its just that i am looking for a full solution and realtick has fees that are double tradestations. I looked at IB with a plug in from esignal, but not sure how integrated it is, or is just the ability to make trades in an order window. I am either pushing to tradestation and maybe IB.
jebara, For software, you can use Quotetracker: http://www.quotetracker.com It is fully integrated with CyberTrader, Interactactive Brokers, MB Trading (MB has not been mentioned yet) as well as many others. It has full Integrated Trading and provides you with streaming quotes, streaming charts, etc. Its free for everyone with ads and the registration is $5 per month to get rid of ads. Registration is free for CyberTrader and MB Trading clients. If you go with IB and their datafeed isn't giving you everything you need, you can always subscribe to a paid datafeed for use with QT (Money.net, IQFeed, eSignal, MarketFeed, etc) and it would still be much cheaper than the other choices. And our support is better than most others Jerry Medved http://www.quotetracker.com
The best way to make a decision is service. If they both have about the same fees then look at service.
jerry, IB only allows you 40 tickers ata time, right? So if someone wanted to be watching a couple hundred tickers(not simultaneously but also not having to input them all manually each time), how would you do that in QT? Is it possible to have multiple stock lists that you can call up? Thanks for your help here. I have to say QT is looking better all the time.
Yes, IB is max 40 at a time. In QuoteTracker you can have as many portfolios as you want, so if you wanted to split up all your stocks into portfolios of 40 symbols each, you can switch between them, but that really isn't the optimal solution. If you have that many symbols, it would be best to get a datafeed that supports more symbols being tracked concurrently. You can use it instead of IB for the quotes, or at the same time as IB (IB as a source for one portfolio, the other datafeed a source for another portfolio open at the same time). IQFeed - max 500 - stocks, options, futures, indices http://www.quotetracker.com/iqfeed MarketFeed - max 200 - stocks, options, indices http://www.quotetracker.com/marketfeed Money.net - max 80 - stocks, options, futures, indices http://www.quotetracker.com/money.net NOTE that you can trade with IB (or whoever else) regardless of what source you select for quotes. Jerry