Update: I had my best week ever with IB last week (trading futures only). So far IB is working very well using MC (EL, not .NET) as a front end with IQFeed and IB data. Plus I am saving money on comm. vs. TS. I had some Twilight Zone ES fills with TS Tuesday last week. I still can't ever figure out what happened. TS has screwed up my stock trading tax reports for several years in a row now. IB also has better security. I believe TS is a good place to develop your coding skills however with all the coding examples and it is a one-stop-shop (simplicity). Right now, I have relegated TS to back-up broker status.
Hi guys (and girls?): I am back using TS. The newer Object Oriented EasyLanguage is very useful to me. I find the fills comparable to those at IB with MC. No Black Swan events yet. I have had a couple lags with both IB and TS each so far this year. You can limit repetitive ticks in TS to cut down on lag BTW. TS even got my 1099-B (for stocks) correct for the first time since 2011. I hope IB improves TWS, my fills show as unfilled for 10 or 15 seconds after being filled for futures. Although they show up as filled in MC. Thomas Peterffy is an immigrant rags-to-riches hero. Perhaps TS has improved since you guys abandoned it years ago?
I've been using TS fulltime for a few months and so far haven't had any problems with lag or crashes. Fills have been very fast although I only use limit orders. I have an IB account but never funded it. I like how I can set up various orders in TS. I didn't really care for TWS layout or the terrible charting, and I love the TS multiple desktops/workspaces and nicer-on-the-eyes graphics. Plus I guess I am kind of wed to TS now since I have invested a lot of time learning EasyLanguage and have a number of strategies. If I experience the type of issues described here and elsewhere I may have to reconsider and check out MC with CQG or IB.
TS as a broker is a piece of shit, it requires a separate account for futures, another for stocks, another for option, like if it was 1997, a piece of shit.
Just one for futures and one for stocks and options. It would be nice if they still did forex. So far I haven't found it to be an issue having 2 accounts as I allocate a certain portion for futures and the rest for stocks and options. If I were to ever need to transfer funds from one account to the other it's done next day. I can see how this can be unfavorable for people, for me personally it hasn't affected my trading. Options House is the same way, I've been using them for a while before switching to TS.
Yes this is a really ridiculous policy. Whats even worse is that if you use a corporate account, every cash movement from one account to another will require a signed paper document to be scanned and emailed to them. Not sure why they allow you to email it though, I would expect them to require pigeon mail delivery or at least fax while they are at it.
Hey NoBias, I was reading through this thread and caught your flash crash experience. Would you share details? Have you made any system changes? I am trying to improve my risk management for flash crashes and would appreciate your insight, since I wasn't trading then. Thank you
TradeStation has not gone downhill over the years - I use TS going back about 20 years and IB the last few, and a few others. TS is very stable - I am doing dozens of tick level functions on 1,300 streaming symbols while running half a dozen tick charts with all kinds of custom programmed functions going on - The system is very fast and never bogs. TS has been making improvements and adding in features like they always do. I do not see people on the TS forum saying they have gone down hill.
Yeap this comment is quite ridicolous IMHO. However I have been costumer of TS since 2008 and I agree with the issues mentioned earlier at the brokerage level.(universal account in primis) But beside this for me the real interest is the option to trade Asian index and the notably lower commission on the TF. I will need to see what is the latency though from TS to IB.