I have been able to demo both Laser and Sterling Trader Pro platforms and was looking for feedback as to what you feel are the pros and cons on both of them? I like Laser better but their charts are not to great in my opinion. I am looking for comments on execution, news, layout, hotkeys and any good information anyone would like to add so I can make a good decision. Thank you - :eek:
Ive traded both and couldn't stand the Sterling Platform. The Laser is extremley fast and has a Blotter that tells your actual P&L with commissons. Charts & Scanner do SUCK on LASER so I use Esignal for now!
Also, Laser has a terrible, undocumented method of linking to Excel whereas Sterling Pro has a wonderful, robust API that works great.
I trade on the Sterling and it also has a blotter where you can not only see your commisions but you can see all of your ECN fees and SEC fees. Its a pretty good software for hot keys. You can create almost any key that you want. Also the Charts are almost equivalent to Esignal. If anyone wants to see a screenshot of my layout PM me.
I use sterling, tech indicators are very limited, Im not sure if you can design your own, Ive checked the manual but couldnt find any info on how to. Never used Laser so cant compare, but Sterling is a good overall platform.
You're joking, right? I haven't used Laser but compared to the IB API, Sterling API sucks. The biggest problem is that Sterling cannot handle even the slightest disconnect and will completely shut down if it detects one. No background reconnects like IB, it just shuts down. This is bad enough for a manual trader, but if you're running a program through the API it's a complete disaster. The next problem is if you have many L2 windows open. The more you have open, the slower your API execution gets. Have more than 3 open and it's very noticeable. Then there's the API documentation. It's seriously lacking in details and I have spent a lot of time experimenting just to figure out how things really work. Try calling Sterling for API support. The receptionist absolutely positively will not forward you to a programmer who can actually answer your questions. And rarely can he answer your questions himself. And I get to pay $150+ per month per login for this. If my firm offered an alternative I'd drop this platform in a heartbeat. Regarding the original poster's question, I think it's nothing special for manual trading. It's got hot keys but has a couple annoying bugs. First, you can't force the price to round to the nearest penny in a hot key. So if you set your hot key price to "bid" and there's a sub penny price on the bid it will set it to that. If you send at that price it will get rejected for having a sub-penny price. So you have to manually fix this price before you can transmit the order. This happens a lot on SPY. Second, if you set your hot key to stay on the current account, when hit that hot key, the position reported in your L2 window will change to either zero or to another account's position. I've had plenty of mistrades thanks to that feature. Sorry for the rant, but man, the topic of Sterling really sets me off.