I just downloaded trader work station from IB. It seems to have zillion features and lot of tweaking build into it. I understand take a month to two to become comfortable with it, and you don't want to open a position or close order Du to unfamiliarity with software. Is IB Trader workstation is powerful software that worth to learn or it's piece of junk that makes your trading more complicate due to all unneeded feature build into it ? I just want be sure i'm not wasting my time and later doesn't have to more to another platform. Thanks for your insight.
if you dont use a feature, then it wont affect you excel has 50,000 features, but if all you want to do is add two numbers , it can do that for you too
Bad comparison. Excel is a general app that has been around in use for decades and gradually enhanced. Still interested to hear from long time TWS users. Thanks
You just have to get familiar. It takes 5 days not much. If you have time to kill you can check the features, But you don’t need to go through them all to be profitable. Depends what you trade also. What are your problems. For each problem then maybe one feature.
To be honest i don't like the look of TWS, seems cumbersome. Too much features on to your face when you open it first. seems heavy for the beginning. My question is simple? Is it a good platform (not for sake of being free to use, i don't mind paying) or there are better competing alternatives example Tradestation ...etc
It’s not a shiny platform but it’s a great one. Good and better, it depends what you’re looking for. If you’re DOM trading and scalping. NO If you’re volume profiling. NO If you’re hardcore at charting. NO I like IB for their wide portfolio and risk metrics. Their options chain and strategy builder. Their stocks screeners is good also.
Used it for over 11years, works great, I never needed all the config options but they're well coded. Never had delays or fill problems, it's a world class app. I use esignal charts
Of all the platforms I've used TWS is hands down the worst. Not because it's objectively bad, but rather because it tries to be absolutely everything to everyone all at once and subsequently is unintuitive on everything. There will be people who have used it for a dozen years and tell you it is great for what they do. That may be true, but more likely its a case of Stockholm Syndrome. It feels like it was put together by some project manager drawing caricatures of traders on a whiteboard. For example, putting a futures spread in is completely counter-intuitive. Their options chain features are better but still lacking in comparison to competing platforms (TOS for example). It has every feature you need but none of them really improve your workflow. Trading options on TWS was okay in general but left me feeling like its more of a beta TOS than something unique and interesting. The only thing extremely nice about TWS is the news feeds. If you trade on news or analyst reports those sections are great. If you trade any other way...find a third party platform. Paying for a hair treatment after ripping what's left of it out of your scalp over something not working right is far more expensive than a decent commercial platform. That being said their customer service is very helpful. As for programming - their API for every language but Python is relatively intuitive but dated. Moreover, it is incredibly frustrating forgetting the little rules for account verification (they are strict, which is good except when you want to run something unattended).The API documentation however is lackluster and it's better to just use their sample code as a guide. To make this feedback constructive to IB lurkers - I realize these things are hard to change once they're in place but if I had one suggestion adopting technology like protobuf would vastly simplify the time to launch for programmatic trading especially given the system is based entirely on RPC already. Take advantage of the research already done in good platform design from TOS and others and mold it into something of your own. You're a huge company with a ton of a capital and smart developers.
Exactly the same goes for TWS. TWS has been around for more than two decades I believe. How old did you think it is?