I have accounts at both IB and Tade Station. The trade station account is for back-up and I do my 10 rt's/month for the free charting, etc. Anytime there is a surge in ticks on the ym, es, nq, or er2, trade station freezes up. You will NOT be able to execute, send, or cancel orders during high tick volume. IF your matrix order system freezes up, which it will during high tick volume, any orders sitting in the matrix will not be transmitted. I have been told by TS and their forums to upgrade CPU, get 2mg of ram, etc...all have been done. For active index futures trading, TS is not reliable. If you are NOT having these same problems with TS and the index futures, I'd be happy to hear about it and your computer make-up. It makes me feel good about IB, so all of you who keep starting threads about IB being slow, etc...stop it....you could be using TS. (lol)
Use Windows task manager and keep an eye on CPU usage on the performance bar. If it gets near the top, you should be careful with order placement. It's cheaper in terms of CPU usage to just throw your orders out via hot-key on the level 2 screens and not the matrix bar.
TS was a joke a few years ago, so nothing has changed, other than the fact that they don't rob you with $200-300 a month fees anymore.
i am going to open a account with tradestation for primarily swing trading. They support hidden orders, peg orders, and Time in Force. Do you think its acceptable for that?
I have had similar problems with TS on a fairly consistent basis lately. But I keep many charts open including several tick charts that feed intraday indicators. Loading up my charts takes a solid 7-8 minutes or so upon starting TS so for that reason I like keeping my platform running overnight in the event I want to check prices late, but have found that re-booting my PC each morning and re-starting TS has minimized the freezeups. Problem is, of course that if you rely on any non-stored data such as bid/ask, block trades per bar, etc, that data is then nuked upon reboot. In a nutshell, TS does kinda suck but I keep using it.
Yea, I thought CPU usage, too, but here's what I see. 1) CPU usage modulates between 50%-70%. 2) When ticks are blowing in like a hurricane, TS freezes and CPU usage stays in the same range. 3) Remember, I'm talking about monitoring ER2, ES, YM, and NQ...not stocks. The tick changes on these instruments is huge compared to most equity issues. TS is probably fine for equity trading, etc, but for active index futures trading it seems to be horrible. I'll just continue to do my 10 rt's/month for the free charting and use it as a back-up. I would do more trading there, but the risk is too high.
I have both TS and IB. I just started trading with IB again this week. My primary goal was to save money on commissions and earn a decent return on my balance. After my first week and after a few issues of learning the DOM interface I have with IB I am thinking that IB is the way to go. BTW, I am keeping TS for the radarscreen and charting. Even after paying $160 per month for that (I dont think I want to keep enough in the account to trade 5000 shares for the above reasons) I think I will save $200-300 per month.
Wow, thanks for this feedback....as I was about to open an account there....just for emini futures !! Strange though....I was at this online presentation with a Mike DiGioia...and he is a successful pro trading eminis and he was using Tradestation....with great success. I wonder if Tradestation suffers from the problem of attempting to transmit all ticks.....versus the tick-sampling technique of Interactive and the others like ThinkOrSwim. I've been with ThinkOrSwim for 9 months....almost never goes down....and never, EVER freezes. Now, the strange thing is....you'll see ticks in NQ "pop" sometimes 2-3 points.....and you say to yourself....that's not "real". However, in reality, that's what occurs with "sampled" feeds. You won't get every tick, but you won't freeze-up either.