I liked the Cyber platform. But I think Schwab had turned them into shit. And I am not afraid to speak out loud on it. Here's some of the experiences that I posted: quote: 03-11-10 11:25 AM Cyber was my personal favorite. Until Schwab bought them out. Now it is marketed under the name StreetSmart Pro by Schwab. Order execution and cancellation very bad and slow. I got killed trading the opening with it and since dumped it. What a horror to see you can't cancel an order or change the price for 2 minutes at the opening! Caused me big losses. That was beginning of 2009. Now RealTick is my favorite. I think it has the best execution for retails. endquote:
I concur with that. TradeStation has its own problems. I did experience a couple of outages in the past 2 years that I have used it. Lucky for me I don't trade too actively with TradeStation so the impact to me was not big. Every trading platform hicks up once in a while. Especially during fast market conditions. It is important to have a way to hedge in those circumstances. (e.g. if you trade equity mostly, have a futures account on standby so if you long some stocks and the market is crapping, and your platform locks up, use your other futures account to sell the ES futures to hedge before you can get out. Something like that.)
Townsend charges something like USD$260 a month for the platform fee. Usually your broker would rebate you that platform fee if you do X number of trades per month. Different brokerage firms have different arrangements. I use "mastertrader.com". I like them. www.mastertrader.com Terranova also offers RealTick. Although they usually try to sell you on their own "Tradient" platform (formerly named RushTrade). Tradient is too light for my need. I don't like it at all. Not sure what Terranove is pushing now. http://www.tnfg.com/
What kind of order? I'm not aware of any restrictions on using ECNs. As for order cancellation and execution, if you are using ECNs they are the same as any other broker. I agree that the SSP platform is not as good as Cyber, but neither is RT or TS. The open poster was concerned about security of his deposit. I think Schwab is at the top here. With RT you have to deal with a separate broker, which is usually some small operation, and a clearing firm. TS is clearly not in the same league financially with Schwab.
It was using Schwab's own "SmartEx" Smart Exchange route. They don't let us route orders to ECNs directly I don't think. Can't remember. It's been a while. The time was January 2008, not 2009. Sorry. So it was 2 years ago. My trading: I make most of my living trading the openings. In the opening, it's the quick or the dead. When Schwab did the "integration" thing to convert all Cyber users to StreetSmartPro... the orders that I placed at the opening... (I always use limit orders). Placed the orders to buy/short. Orders status "open". Waiting waiting waiting. I saw on level-2 the price traded right through my price. But no confirmation on the fill. So the position screen was empty. I should have the long/short positions that I ordered. But I couldn't tell. I wanted to get out: either to take the quick profit or to minimize my loss as the market went against me... status still open! I cannot sell or cover since the platform did not get a fill confirmation. Typically I waited 2 minutes for the fills to show. And one time as long as 5 min. But the time, prices had already run away. I called Schwab's trade desks and tech support about it many times, of course. All I got was the "oh well..." kind of responses. And sometimes their queue time as longer than 5+ minutes, or the tradedesk's line was jammed. I know Schwab's typical demographic is those who trade 100 shares here and 200 shares there a few times a week or something. They clearly were not geared towards high volume retail traders. I placed 50 round-trips a day. Anyway, my business cannot afford to wait around for them to improve. I cut over to use RealTick in a week. I don't know if Schwab had made improvement or not in the past 2 years. I have no intention to find out.