Hi all. I should mention a brief trading bio. I began trading 3 years ago. Did OK. Took a banking job, recently left that to return to trading independently. A lot seems to have changed. Before, I was using rediplus to execute and AT financial to view charts. There are so many new packages and data feeds now it is making my head spin and I am a bit overwhelmed. I signed up with IB and am trying to learn their software. My first day looking at it was friday but it still is very complicated to me. I hear AT is now out of business. Could anyone point me toward a chart package that is similar? I dont' want to run one off the web, I want a standalone package to look at stocks, index futures and perhaps bonds or commodities. Also, I was reading on here about button and ninja trader and am thinking of giving that a try. Do they make the IB interface any easier to use? I am having a hard time learning it. A big Thank You to anyone who can shed some light. I am not quite a newbie: I can trade OK(at least I did when I last attempted it) so I'm not quite clueless, just having problems getting my system started again.
Probably the two most popular retail feeds are eSignal and QCharts. Both have pluses and minuses. You might also want to look at medved Quote Tracker, which will run off the IB feed or can use a number of other feeds. Jerry Medved is on this board a lot, and is very willing to answer questions. The QT website has a list of data feeds. Check out the software review section of this site, and also check out www.daytradingstocks.com for an exhaustive list of brokers and software. There have been a number of threads on here recently concerning s/w and brokers. The TWS interface takes a week or so to get used to, but once you do it becomes very easy to use and intuitive. Just make sure you don't buy when you want to sell or vice versa.
I have used AT since it was owned by S&P in the late '90's . I was very disappointed when ILX bought them and expected them to put that fine program on the shelf, which they sort of did. ILX is apparently owned by Thomson Financial and the nearest thing to AT is now called Thomson One Equity. It looks like good stuff, but as they seem to be marketing to institutions (perhaps aimed at the Bloomberg crowd), it might be outrageously priced. I'm waiting for a quote on the service now. Here's the link to their webpage for this product: http://www.thomson.com/common/view_...ary=financial&product_name=Thomson_ONE_Equity best wishes and great handle.
AT Financial was bought out by Thomson, which already owned ILX. However, Thomson also has an ownership in a direct access brokerage firm, TradePortal. I'm not 100% certain, but I think the TradePortal uses the original AT Financial charting system that you liked. They may be worth checking out if you liked that charting system, which I understand is very good (www.tradeportal.com). -Eric