how many times does one have to say it ... TOS blows !!! : 0 ) if you want an unstable platform and system resource hog... go for TOS just try it and see for yourself... don't take my word for it. not to mention the fact (which they readily admit) .. that the data feed for charts is slowed down. do you really want your broker slowing down your chart feed for you ? how considerate of them. don't misunderstand. i love the looks of their charting. but it can only be relied upon on an end of day basis. if you want to intraday trade with it or scalp with it.. you are better off looking somewhere else. of course you could pay for an outside data feed for your TOS platform... BUT TOS WON'T ALLOW IT !!! and even if they did, you would still be stuck with an unreliable platform which is hella heavy on the java sauce if you know what i am saying.
TOS analytics (for options) are second-to-none, however. And the platform is very easy to use; nothing complex about managing complex options positions with TOS. Data and platform issues do come and go -- I wouldn't want to daytrade futures with TOS -- and, yes, I sure wish these problems weren't so chronic. But I don't rely on TOS for primary market data. And I can only think of one time when it's inconvenienced me while attempting to manage a trade, and that problem was solved by a call to the order desk. As for IB, I'm thrilled to hear that you can trade options through TWS. For now, I've given up trying to figure out how to do anything on TWS but by a sell futures contracts; IB's platform has most the confounding interface I've encountered since ... hell, I dunno, something that ran on DOS, I suppose.
I have been running ToS for nearly a year. Five months of paper trading and 6 months of money trading. I've had problems only twice. Once with a new release which they had to roll back. And once as my old computer was committing suicide. And I can choose my data speed. Therefore, I am suspicious when a popular and profitable and reliable service (for me) is trashed with such vituperativeness.
I have used TOS, no longer. IB is the best on the street - for execution, products, and speed. While I will agree the TOS platform is nice, it comes down to products, execution, and speed and IB is faster. I have the latency data somewhere - I remember the latency from order-router to exchange was faster than TOS. Of course latency doesn't matter at-all if you are manually clicking the mouse, however for auto-trading hosted solutions it makes a huge difference. If you don't like IB's trading platform you can use other approved platforms to interface into IB. IB also has a great reporting feature for PM accounts. I like Lightspeed as well. If you are trading I would say IB, if you are retail investor (not trader) than TOS or Lightspeed is very good for your needs.
I completely agree... One other thing that people don't mention is the "active trader" tool. With it's auto-send option, it makes the newer trader make trades without fully thinking them through. Plus, with the data feed being too slow to support the tool and a "p/L" column, a new trader begins to watch the "AT ladder" tick-by-tick. Everytime price moves faster than the tool, the pro's are able to take even more advantage of the newbies emotional attachment to the trade. It's very sad that TOS does such things to collect their $2/car -- I am sure they are pillaging other who pay higher commissions even worse.
I surmise that you have a high post count by repeating yourself over and over and over and over again.