Example - this is the bad part - have to set PDH and PDL manually, horizontal lines on es do not stay at 0.25 increments, unable to set daily open to desirable market hours (change from Globex to NY open) - have to set chart to ignore outside regular hours trading to to get the 09:30 NY open I know you can customize the time in the chart parameters - but a simple market dependent chart time setting, like Ninjatrader has, is the best way. The "know all's" really know sfa about trading J_S
Example - this is the good bit - customizable buttons for fast order entry, order numbering for bracket trades, amend bracket levels by either chart lines or buttons. It is hard to beat this customization - if they had a separate screen just for order entry it would be even better, but again, the know it all's never listen J_S
@Metamega - I will definitely check out my options for 3rd party software providers. Thanks for the tip. @J_Smith - Thank you very much for the examples. It looks like there are plenty of positives and negatives for the platform which I'm sure is true of most platforms. Unfortunately I won't be able to actually test out TWS with my paper trading account (see below). I received a response from IB regarding my charting issues and apparently it is not an issue at all. Anyone using delayed data will not have charts that are automatically updated. Here is a portion of their response: "IB archives our own historical data. Because of this, we offer the data for free with the corresponding L1 market data subscription, but we do impose some limitations. The way the data is tagged and archived, we would not be able to provide any automatic charting with delayed data. This a decision that has been made by higher management and this limitation applies to all IB Accounts using delayed data." So I can play around with the features but there is no way I can actually trade given these limitations. This is very frustrating since obviously it is impossible to evaluate a platform without actually trading on it. I think I will go ahead an fund my account, pay for some data and then try some paper trading. Worst case scenario is I don't like it and close it out... Once again thank you everyone for your helpful responses. I now consider this case closed.