I have a Linux PC and a Mac. Almost anything can be ported to run on Mac from BSD or Linux. I just use homebrew on macOS though. Only place I'd run Linux over macOS is on a dedicated server, running something like Gentoo distro built from source for complete customization. Portage (Gentoo's package manager) was really good, but took a little time to learn. The documentation was also very good though. Good luck.
Well there are only two choices for Linux users: IB and TDAmeritrade. Is TDAmeritrade better? And how? Why is IB a bad choice? What can I do about it, other than switching?
We've had this conversation before ... Choice of OS is the least important for manual trading. When you experience large loss as market runs away from you, let's see the strength of your conviction. I am only referring to low floats. If you trade mostly large caps, IB should be fine. TDAmeritrade doesn't have per share commissions, so not suitable for active day trading.
Choice of OS is already made. I don't trust a secret source OS. The only way I could ever trust WinDOHs or Mac is if they released it as open source. I hate to say this, but everyone doing any sort of financial work on a Windows machine is very vulnerable. The potential risk of a mass attack is very real. I will stick with that until MS proves otherwise by making source available to the public. But I still don't understand why market will run away from me with IB and not with other brokerages. Why is IB different? Not trying to bust your balls here... I am genuinely curious and have a good reason for wanting to know.
Today was supposed to be a trading day but I have to go to my union hall this morning and do some research and planning for my possible retirement this week. I will trade tomorrow if there is anything that looks really good. It has been a productive weekend and I really want to keep the momentum going. I got the diesel in the big boat starting/running again, but there are steering system issues and I have a long list of other things to fix. I got my trading station set up in a better location with a bigger main monitor. However I want to look into fitting a better graphics card that can handle 4 monitors, at the least. I have to design and build a twin belt grinder setup for the shop. I really need that and some other specialized purpose built gear for making razors. Still trying to locate an engine for the truck at a decent price incl shipping. So today is just not a good day to try and trade. I will have a go in the morning and take my three trades if I see a good setup. Once I am fully funded I will trade, or at least look for setups, pretty much every market day.
New monitor is crap. Fine for watching movies on. 32". Between it and the mediocre graphics card it was giving me fits. Well it wasn't actually a "new" monitor. It was GF's old TV and I just didn't want to kick the old dinosaur to the curb. I figured it had a second life left in it. First I could not get all the video to appear in the screen. It went past the edge on any 16 x 9 res. The available 4 x 3 resolutions were too low, and stretch the pic really bad. Tried to trade, kept it small, 100 shares and I don't even remember the ticker now. Looked like a mean reversion setup. Bought on the bottom bounce, nailed the entry. There was resistance at the even dollar amount and I sold a couple cents below that. Then I shorted when it turned around and surprise, I got stopped out. I should know better by now to wait and see if it will break out or not, especially with a small position that is easy to get out of. I liked the volume I was seeing so I decided to take my third and final trade long on it. Increased to 400 shares and had to wade through all TWS's default warnings warning warning warning about this and that and the other and anyway I botched the entry and got stopped out immediately with my default initial stop order. $14 profit. Well at least I didn't lose money. And for a half hour work sitting in my fruit of the looms with my morning cappuccino in front of me, I guess it was better than manning the drive thru at Rallys. So, disappointing morning but no harm done. Scoured the house for more cables and adapters and power cords, got the 21" monitor hooked up. Decided to try a different window arrangement, with multiple charts showing. The original idea was to have all charts showing on the big screen, maybe 6 of them, All other display elements (Trader WorkStation, Mosaic) would be in the other monitor. Well I decided I had enough real estate on the small monitor to display 4 or 5 charts, so I set it up that way. Then back to the big screen. For some reason it works if I plug in the small one first. The highest resolution it will support is still pretty cheesy though. Like looking at my old 386 Tosh laptop running W3.1. Still I put a order pane and a bunch of charts there. Looks better from a distance. I got a feeling I won't be using that one much. Machine is a refurb Dell Optiplex 7010, a very popular small form factor box. I figured I would just stick a better graphics card in it but the problem is the PS is only 240w and that is pretty low to also power a decent graphics card that will go at least 1080p on multiple monitors. So I might not bother. I can run two screens, I just need something made in this century in place of that 32" behemoth. I snagged a used GT 710 card on fleabay for cheap, and also a 450w PS that was cheap. I don't know if it will fit in the case, though. But I saw guys on youtube running that card in this box using the original 240w power supply so I know it CAN be done. A few things are starting to irritate me about TWS. Well, not so many considering the complexity of the platform. But one thing in particular... I change my settings while in paper trading and the changes do not carry over into live trading, and vice versa. I have to remember what I changed and switch modes, and change it in the other mode. Particularly regarding screen layout, hotkeys, and order defaults. And also adding a stop and a limit exit after an entry could be a bit more intuitive. I have accidentally canceled my stop or profit taker a couple of times and had to scramble to get another one back in place and make sure it was all one cancels all. And it would be cool if I could place orders right from my stock screener, which is TradingView. I highly recommend it, BTW, as a cheap alternative to Trade Ideas which I admit has a lot more features but is a bit pricey for small traders. Trading View has put me on a lot of stuff, and dealt me the nuts my first day live trading when I made somewhere around $840 or $860 with my allotted three trades from my $10k account. I don't remember what I am paying, TBH but they do have a free trial. I usually just show Bollinger and MFI for indicators though I have been playing around with Ichimoku a bit. Don't really understand it yet. Sigh back to Amazon I guess. I am accumulating a hell of a lot of trading books. I now have more trading books than all my boat books on engines, electrical, nav, sailmaking and rigging, cruising guides, etc. and I have only fully read a couple of them so far. I have been playing around with the free code samples and API from Alpaca and I am learning Python so I can do my own coding. Alpaca has free paper trading so it will be a good jumping off point for auto trading through IB's gateway. As it is now, I have to try really hard to make my three allowed trades per week count. Once I am properly funded which will happen in a couple of months I can skim the cream off lots of small positions which looks like what algo trading would be really good at. I can see particularly how mean reversion would be good for that. Compute support, compute resistance, buy on the bounce with a tight stop, set the profit taker a few ticks below resistance, recompute support and resistance and apply them if they have changed, and do this over and over until the action dies down. If the computer is picking say 10 or 20 stocks and buying in at $1k or so each and making as many wins as losses, it should do a reasonable profit. I got to paper trade it a good while first and only gradually increase my number of trades when I go live, obviously. I also am thinking it would be good to have some triggers that would cause the software to halt trading if some conditions are not met, and to give me an alert on a possible breakout situation where I would take over that position manually. OMG how I love breakouts! A lot more exciting than bouncing from bank to bank up the trend channel. It is like watching a straight flush form up in poker. That was something I constantly struggled with when I was active in the game, and I had a hard time containing my tells at the table well enough to keep more discerning players out of my head. Some hands are just too exciting. Same with a good breakout except I can grin and talk to my cards (the chart) all I want, in private. All I have to do is keep from trading emotionally and I can do that. So, two winning trade days in a row, though both were small. Soon I will be back up to $10k and I would already be quite a bit over it if I had not used the IB debit card twice. So going on three months now and I have not gone below $9800 on my initial $10k account. Well, I have been pretty conservative on the risk management and I could probably stand to loosen it up a bit in practice. I figured 2% funding risk on any one trade and max 10% total at any given time, but in reality I have usually not gone anywhere near those limits. Erring on the side of caution kept me safe when I needed to keep myself safe. Now I will be funded in a couple of months and I think I will reduce my allowable per trade risk to 1% but I will compute my position size properly and use up all that risk allowance. At least as long as it is working for me. One thing I took home from reading the Turtle book is that even a very simple plan has a pretty good chance of being profitable if the trader STICKS EXACTLY TO THE PLAN. That runs a bit counter to my way of doing things but I can adapt to it. So computing risk, entries, stops and limits, will be part of that plan. The human factor can really hose up a trade or a whole account. And I need to better optimize and systemize my hotkey setup. Click and drag trading has botched a lot of entries for me. Honestly I think typing an order line would work better. "OCA BUY LMT ASK-.01, STL -.10, SELL LMT +.35" or whatever. I can type that a lot quicker than twiddling a mouse or figuring out which hotkey combination I want. Hey maybe when I am coding Python well enough and familiar enough with IB's API I can make a console app for that. I think botched entries and exits have cost me as much as unexpected price action. Of course you know what Patton or one of those generals said about plans. "No battle plan survives intact after first contact with the enemy." LOL. Then, Pogo Possum said famously, "We have met the enemy, and he is us." So bit by bit I will be formulating a plan that will actually be followed, never to be changed without forethought. No more winging it. Bottom line, two winning trading days in a row. Small potatoes profit but expected as a newb with a small account. I am satisfied with how things are going and I can definitely project into greater profits than I could ever hope to achieve with buy and hold, or mutuals. I AM TRADER. HEAR ME ROAR!
First I could not get all the video to appear in the screen. It went past the edge on any 16 x 9 res. For the inexpensive, "Full HDTV" (1080p -- 1920 by 1080 pixel resolution) televisions I use as monitors, to get hdmi input to show full screen and not chop off bottom: menu->setup->overscan->off or menu->setup->zoom mode->just scan Your 32" tv might have similar settings.
This was a fairly old TV, and relatively speaking, pretty cheap. And Ubuntu did not show me any overscan settings in the gui Settings menu. Didn't know where to set them with console. But working now, seeing the full display onscreen. I suspect the resolution I am seeing is all that is supported by the hardware. Usually Linux with only its built in kernel based driver code picks up old hardware and plays it as good or better than WinDOHs does even with the Windows drivers. We don't have any Windows computers in the house to compare it to though GF uses WinDOHs at work. This is just the odd thing that in spite of being pretty old and generic, isn't well supported natively by my OS. She was just using it as a TV until she bought one that was thinner by about 4" LOL. It had since been gathering dust. If it wasn't so heavy and awkward it would have made it to the curb years ago. I have seen and used the overscan setting in Raspbian, on the RPi. If I really needed to use the old 32" then I would probably try one of the generic Linux 3rd party drivers, but I think I will just get another monitor similar to the 21". Anyway, the way I have the TWS screen set up now I can do pretty good with just the one monitor. The second (and 3rd!) monitor, just something nice to have since I have room enough at my trading desk.
Ubuntu did not show me any overscan settings in the gui Settings menu. It's the TV itself, not the computer's operating system, that would have these settings.