Hi Elite traders. I have tried for about two years to construct an as automated as possible system for a trade plan I have worked on that fits me and that I believe in. During this time I only worked with a single broker and their platform and API. What I found is that you can only do so much with this approach. It doesn't seem to cover all parts of a plan that I want implemented. After going back to the drawing (or thinking) board I got the brilliant idea "why not combine two or more broker systems". I'm sure most of you here on the forum found that out long ago but well, call me a slow learner, better late than never. Now I'm asking you of your thoughts and feedback on if this actually is a valid approach. Pros, cons and discussion in general is appreciated. More specifically I am looking at combining TD Ameritrade and Interactive Brokers. To add, I have experience with IB but I am new to TD Ameritrade. My reason for this choice is due to I want to trade neutral option combos on indices and ETFs based on a variety of asset classes (e.g. equity, commodities, fx based) and as I see it IB's strength is a wide range of instruments and their options are available for trade for an attractive commission. Another strength is that it is possible to automate the order process, even option combos programmatically via their API solutions. The language of choice personally is Java since I have previous experience in that language. The weaknesses as I see it is that the Java API is not really that intuitive and documentation can be improved. Also the market data specific to options (e.g greeks) seem not to be reliable. The strength with ThinkOrSwim is the intuitive platform and I find their scan tools can be a handy way to use for filtering/analysis of investment criteria. Setting up alerts as part of the monitoring process seems easy and intuitive too. Also, the market data is more reliable. Note: This is my impression. I have not yet personal experience so I may be wrong here. Also as an additional bonus, if you do want to study manually a what-if scenario they have a nice tool for that. The weaknesses would be that they are fairly high priced on commissions and, as far as I currently know, it is not possible to automate the order process. Again I may be wrong on this and I need to investigate this further. As far as programming goes the script language seems easy enough in itself to learn but it seems to be a part of the platform (again I need to learn more specifics) which may or may not be a weakness. It might be both good and bad. The issue at hand for me is if, and if so, how I could combine the strengths of both systems in creating an end-to-end trading system. I realize that there would also likely be a need for "intermediary" systems/applications that can process the output(s) of one trade system to make it proper as input for the other trade system. A more concrete (I hope) example of what I have started working on (still a work in progress): 1. Analysis process: Use the scan tool in ThinkOrSwim to create filters corresponding to the investment criteria that operate on the trade universe (the number of underlyings) that returns a smaller list of instruments. 2. Intermediary system: Take the output from ThinkOrSwim's scan filter and use as input in another system to prepare input into IB. a. Use Excel. b. Use a csv file as input to (in my case) Java. 3. Order process: Use the input from the intermediary system to programmatically create combo orders and execute them in IB's Trader Workstation. A problem with this that I identified is that I would need to transfer information back again to ThinkOrSwim for the alert processing and then again if an alert do trigger to again transfer information back from ThinkOrSwim to IB. Thus the idea of this combination of strenghs seem to give rise to new challenges. Long post I know, but I hope I haven't bored you and maybe we can have a healthy discussion about this and in the best of worlds we all learn a little bit more. /Robert