Just a quick followup. I looked into the financial statements of Penson and Southwest Securities, two clearing firms used by direct access brokers. I was surprised to find that Southwest is approximately 5 times the size of Penson, measured by balance sheets. As of the June financials, Penson apparently had bank loans of about 80% of shareholder's equity. Southwest had none, although the financials are complicated and I may well be misconstruing items. I'm not suggesting there is anything wrong with Penson, but Southwest seems bigger and less leveraged.
rtharp, please explain "the slow ISI broker" and how you obtained this info, and what platform and setup do you currently use?
To address the question how do you ever find out? Ask. odds are if they don't want to tell you than you don't want to use them. The firms that taken huge degrees to make sure they are one of the best will gladly tell you why. Call all the Realtick brokers and ask a technical service guy for some info. If there is a systemwide problem, you'd better believe I'll be getting out. That is one of the keys that I love about my firm is how I can handle an emergency. If 90% of traders can't get out but I can who will be able to protect capital and profit and who can't. Are you one of the ones who won't be able to get out and have to take a huge hit in your portfolio. ISI is a cheap route that a lot of Realtick brokers use. It was designed for a small # of traders and can get heavily clogged during peak use. I learned about this info because I ask questions and talk to a lot of traders constantly. I had asked my firm the difference in servers which they were happy to provide. Another thing for different brokers would be are they using a point to point (LAN) connection or the internet for their server use. Point to point is on their network and will have no extra hops from one computer to another, while the internet could easily go to 15 different ccomputers before going to the exchange. That can take an extra second or 2. Is their network big enough to handle all of their traders at once? Or will there be bottlenecks. Firms that increase their size without increasing their sever size will hurt traders. I've posted my firm many times but since you asked I'll repeat it again. I am with a Professional firm Echotrade and use their software. Run some searches on them or check out professional thread discussions. rtharp
rtharp, been asking a lot of questions and talking with different professional JBO groups myself. I'm looking to make the pro jump myself. Spoke with a JBO group using ISI software, their comments, not alot of bells and whistles, a basic dot machine with positions and open orders, but they raved about the speed, dependability, Direct+ routing and customer service. These guys cranked out 3-4 mil aday almost exclusively listed. They pulled in alot of Bright traders lately because of constant problems with Redi dependability. Echo looks ok. They use VTS sitting on their clearing firms servers. Their clearing firm directs listed traffic down Helfant securities NYSE line. Don't like that hand-off route or the fact that the only cust service available on trade thruogh or held issues is a clearing firm rep. Also your trading system is dependent on your clearing firms servers,