I use TOS for everything except executions. Love their playback (OnDemand) feature. It will get very expensive to scale in/out. Listen to Robert.
No. You should run a test for yourself because it will convince you more than a 2 bits electron stranger in a public forum with plenty of trolls. And besides, my experience & connection might not be the same as yours, right? Btw TDA claims their market order execution speed is 0.2s after receiving order but my future market order is 2s with 300ms round trip ping.
I have no clue why people so in love in their OnDemand. It takes forever to load for me & by the time it's ready to play back, it's time for me to sleep. The replay on Sierra Chart is instant, not like a molasses as TDA OnDemand, not to mention all the trouble to execute simulating orders on playback time. And the damn button is in a awkward place that you might accidentally click on during real time trading.
Really does it take 2 seconds to fill market orders in Futures? I trade Futures exclusively, and mostly I use market orders. I use CQG via Tradingview for execution, and even in Asian market hours, its market order execusions are almost instant.
thanks for folks for all your input, SKyChef, I think i know why (or should i say "based off what") TD is claiming 0.2 sec execution time.....it's basically Citadel's market order execution time...check their 606 report. the remaining time is for TD/Citadel negotiating how to carve up your pie among themselves i guess on the other hand; what do you folks think of IB vs LS? for those of you using LS, are you using the LS trader L+ platform or the free Livevol X?
I should said it's probably around 1-2s but the 2s occurred more often than not to be noticeable. And this experience is limited till the early months of 2017. Once I moved off my trading account, it's no longer a concern to me. The real major concern at the time was their data feed because it's the origin of all the chained reactions ending at a mouse click event. At first, I noticed their trading sim feed many times about 0.5s ahead of their live data feed. I brought that up in TOS chatroom to see anyone noticing anything different and ended up to prove my case. So I did my due diligence by asking for a CQG demo, running the oil future during EIA report, screen capture videos and voila, CGQ is much faster and much more reliable than TDA's data feed. During those fast time, CQG has a window of about 1min to act while TDA is completely lifeless till you coming back century later. One shot like that takes about 5min to recover and if a couple trains running together, well time to turn off the computers. Then I realized why TOS time frame is limited to 1min, why they couldn't provide the market depth info for data mining, why those users in the chat room couldn't see what I'd see because I looked at the DOM all the times while trading and they looked at their beautiful charts. The experience w/ TDA data feed isn't wasted on me though because I realized I have to change my strategies & tactics. That makes me a better trader but the experience dealing with the users in their chat forum is useless. They are too occupied w/ their beautiful charts & wiggle lines.
CQG is often referred to as the industry standard. They are excellent and have 24 hour worldwide support in many languages. I would not say they are the best as I never tag any software as "best." Best is what meet your needs. I would say in my experiance that platforms dedicated to one asset class often do that better than ones trying to do many things. CQG, TT, Rithmic, CTS T4 focus on Futures. All very good at what they do. We also offer Realtick that does equites, options and futures. The futures trading on Realtick is excellent but does not access all the markets CQG does. Bob
Today, i did 4 round trips on TOS. I only do market orders. Here are the times today's orders were entered, and the times they reported as filled. Entered:09:45:06 07/16/18 ...... Filled 09:45:06 07/16/18 Entered:09:48:05 07/16/18 ...... Filled 09:48:05 07/16/18 Entered:10:26:03 07/16/18 ...... Filled 10:26:03 07/16/18 Entered:10:29:04 07/16/18 ...... Filled 10:29:04 07/16/18 Entered:10:41:16 07/16/18 ...... Filled 10:41:16 07/16/18 Entered:11:14:58 07/16/18 ...... Filled 11:14:58 07/16/18 Entered:14:16:59 07/16/18 ...... Filled 14:17:00 07/16/18 Entered:14:26:41 07/16/18 ...... Filled 14:26:41 07/16/18 I was trading a $29.00 stock @ 3000 shares at a time. At this price level, spread between bid and ask is only 1 cent and you can do 10,000 or more shares on this and some high volume without slippage. I also trade some leveraged ETFs that have 5 to 25 cent spreads and market orders on those (which i do) can have different results. I'm not certain how today's numbers compare with most days. And average volume of stock may effect results.