"Professional" Order Execution platform

Discussion in 'Retail Brokers' started by rdavenport, Jun 9, 2002.

  1. I am looking for the best possible order execution platform. I don't care about charting, scanning, quotes, etc. (I use Erlanger Quote and Dynamic Trader). My specific requirements are:

    1) No ticket charge
    2) reliable/stable platform & service
    3) quick/reliable phone-accessable trading desk
    4) fast execution
    5) basket trades

    I currently use TradeStation. Any suggestions would be appreciated.
     
  2. PHISEL

    PHISEL

    Don't TS 6 fulfil those requirements?
     
  3. I'm not pleased with TradeStations execution. Sometimes its o.k., othertimes it sucks. They do not have anyway to do basket trades at this time. Also no GTC orders.

    On the good side of TradeStation, I love their responsiveness on their trading desk. And I like their commissions (no ticket). But I don't like their charting or quote system which I have to pay $99/month for; therefore I have to pay an additional $160/mo to Erlanger Quote to get what I need (flexible quotes, charting, alerts, etc).

    I'm resigned to the fact that no one vendor can give me everything I want. I'm very happy with DT for Fibonacci and Erlanger for flexible quotes, alerts, basic charts, etc. Now all I need is the best executions from a stable/relaible source.
     
  4. IB gives you all with the exception of #3 ... :(
     
  5. mktman

    mktman

    rdavenport:

    What dont you like about TS executions? Speed, fill?

    How about charting and quotes whats wrong with them?

    Thx.

    mktman
     

  6. actually i dont see why erlanger quotes should be better than ts (ok no screener in ts so far). if u do a little research, u will find pretty much every indicator (incl fibs etc...) that is out there.
    tradestation never was and still is not a product u can switch on and u can use with its full functionality without having been playing with it for a while.


    kev
     
  7. Does anyone here have any experience dealing with Protrader. They were bought by instinet and offer remote trading using gr8 software. Is the software ok for remote? I've heard that sometime great stable software in-house gets re-engineered for remote to accomodate remote traders and results in unstalbe, slow systems. Any insights about software customer service,etc
    Thanks
     
  8. Hubert

    Hubert

    does all you need or at least all you asked for.


    Good luck
     
  9. alanm

    alanm

    GATrader: Unless they've re-engineered gr8Trade in the last few months, you won't be able to use it over a 56K dialup. Even if you have some bandwidth, it's not clear how much it will suck up. Perhaps a gr8trade user can comment.

    I demo'd it for a few weeks, and it would do OK (but see below) during the pre-market, but at 09:30 EDT, it would suddenly swamp my poor 56K dialup, sucking about 10Kb/sec through it (max bandwidth, 2x compressed), and was basically unusable, since it apparently needed far more bandwidth than that. This is despite not having _any_ windows open (no news, monitors, L2s, etc.). You hit it the nail on the head - they apparently are sending the entire quote feed for all symbols to the workstation software, and letting _it_ filter out what the user tells it to, instead of doing the filtering at the server. When you're in the same office as the server, this isn't so bad (though it still takes up a ton of bandwidth, increases packet collisions, etc. on anything but a "star-topology" network). However, it just doesn't make any sense over a dialup.

    In their defense, they do say that you "may have trouble" unless you have a broadband connection. I don't see any way at all it can work, though, except over broadband. Neither could they, when it came down to it.

    Using it during the pre-market and after-hours sessions, I had constant problems with quotes missing from the market-minder/level II/order-book thing, and the news window would also routinely stall. When I reported this, they had to restart their news server.

    Their commissions are closer to those of ticket shops than someone like IB. That may be fine if you do a small number of large trades, but IB's commissions (and execution platform) rule otherwise.
     
  10. I've also used Real Tick on a 56K modem and it still works pretty fast.
     
    #10     Jul 14, 2002