hey everyone. i did a search for Fidelity Active Trader Pro, and found several old comments and a few new ones. so i was wondering if anyone with recent experience (in the past few months) using the ATP platform could comment? particularly about execution speed, speed of chart updates, shorting issues, etcetera. i'm looking into platforms for day trading, and am considering fidelity ATP. not the buy .53, sell .54 within seconds type of day trading. but buy/sell from 15 minutes to several hours (not penny stocks). ie- catching price moves. thanks!
Been using the ATP platform for years, mainly for swing trading. Also some day trades, but no scalping... Fills have not been any problems, but daytrading the QQQQ (or other liquid ETF's/stocks) have never been a problem. Their charting is ok, you should also be able to get Wealth Lab Pro, believe it comes under the $30K/120 trades a year rule...or so. (If you have to move money, something like IB and QuoteTracker (for charting) would be superior, as IB also offer futures and overseas markets and more.) No major complains about the ATP platform, and Fidelity have been upgrading their platform several times a year. Hope this helps.
ATP is a love hate relationship for me. Trade execution using automatic routing is fine and its easy to amend an existing order to cancel/replace. Be wary of the order history window though since it can accumulate a lot of old orders and its not hard to resubmit an old order in place of the one you are actively trying to submit if you make a mistake on one of the required fields (e.g. gtc or day order etc.) and just blindly type without looking. I HATE the option trader pro add in since it makes you construct the option symbols from the root symbol and it also lights up like a Christmas tree to market dynamics in a way that is about impossible to focus on what you want to do. I trade options from ATP but go to Option Trader Pro to do quick checks on the Greeks but analytics for options absolutely sucks. ATP has excellent news/research integrated in stocks. Their stock symbol look up sucks though since there is no way to "wild card" search that I have been able to find and sometimes you have to use only a few characters in the name to get close to the stock you want due to inconsistent name abbreviation conventions. I rarely use the level II quotes or have NEVER used the order routing features since no matter what level you are at its all basically retail level trading anyway. Charting can be flaky and unreliable at times. But I do like their many chart tools. Overall I'd wish they would greatly improve option trading features as well as provide commodity and foreign market interfaces. TS
thanks shfly and TrendSailor. that does help. i forgot to ask this in my original post. i would like to be able to have a screen with several order entries ready to be placed at a moment's notice just by clicking on the appropriate entry, rather than trying to enter the symbol/shares/price at the time i want to submit the order. does Active Trader Pro have something to accommodate this?
I only use Fidelity ATP once in a while for my IRA accounts. It is really not a tool for very active trading, but great for "active investing!" Take advantage of the use of Wealth Lab that is included. Go to one of their free Wealth Lab classes.
their direct trading rocks, especially if you format the hotkeys, they have problems with canceled orders getting cleared ah sometimes, but they are suppossed to get futures in 07, they need to make their platform easier to close out positions.....actually each platform has strengths.....i liked scottrade for ease in closing out positions....and order entry from scratch.....but scottrade has any other numeous problems......i mainly use ib and fidelity.......tradeking has a nice options analytics software package.....i just haven`t needed to buy more than 1000 contracts on the same strike since july so i don`t have any money in that account........plus i believe in knowing my options strategy based on following an underlying for along time tape reading and fundamental analysis. i just don`t pull up some volatility scans and place my bets, not my personal strategy. i would like to try tradestation some day.
Yes, they have a trade window where you can pre-construct any order that you want in any account that you have (I have about 8 separate accounts from personal, joint, IRA, 401K corporate etc.). When you go to submit the order you just pick the one you want from the trade list. You can force an update of the current bid/ask so you can recheck or amend your limit prices to see if they are close to current conditions or submit "at market". I use this order staging a LOT since I do a great number of complex multi-leg options that I leg into and I need to make fast changes to get the best prices during rapid market directional moves to get best implied volatility/prices. Once you submit an order always check the order status window to make sure it actually is an active order. Since I place very large trades with quite large margin balances I have found that for ETF options they will sometimes "swivel chair" a brokerage trader into the order submital process to manually approve the order at Fidelity before submitting to the live market. When they do that it will show as a "pending" status (EXTREMELY ANNOYING in a fast moving market) and it can take minutes to get to real market with these types of high-dollar/high-margin-risk orders. I have to force myself to get in the habit of clearing the order entry list since it forever keeps a copy of any order you ever submitted so you can reconstruct it again. If you are as active as I am that can be many hundreds of orders to scan through each time you submit. So I purge the list every week or so. Good Luck, TS