I'm considering buyng Tradestation software for futures trading with IB. It costs $2,400. Is it worth it?
Do a search on "TradeStation" first. Here is a link to where some of us shared our view on using TradeStation to trade in real-time http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=2369 Backtesting and system development is a different issue all together
If you open a trading account through Tradestation, you can get the software free. It's a minimum $50,000 to open and it's with Bear Stearns I believe. You could probably pay for the software in one month with commission savings at IB though.
Hi Michael I have Tradestation. Its definitely a handy program to have around. But, its not worth paying the full suggested retail price. Theres always Tradestations advertised on Ebay for cheap. Just make sure u verify its authenticity through Omega Research before bidding. Sterling
I don't think that it is interfaced with IB. Maybe I'm wrong. Armaniman mentioned in one of his posts that he is using Tradestation 2000i together with esignal and IB as a broker and he is trading strictly E-minis. He hasn't posted since September 10, does anyone know if he is OK?
Rather than buy 2000i why not just subscribe to the TS Pro service. I have been using it since January and it is extremely reliable. You have all of the features of 2000i and it costs only $99/mth (for former TS users), exchange fees included. With 2000i, you will still need to pay for another data feed.
I used tradestation since version 1.0. ver.4.0 with futuresource sat feed was awesome, great trading s/w plus ability to system test on intraday data. very stable. then came 2000. my experience with it and the PC Quote feed was so bad I trashed it and switched to a cheap internet data/chart service. It was not nearly as stable or reliable as the prior version, and it crashed everytime the internet went down or the PC Quote feed had a glitch(which was very often). Restarting it takes a while, and if you have a trade on you are toast. Also there was no ability to replace the lost data, except through a cumbersome download at night. I'm not familiar with their current products, so I can't say if they have corrected these issues. I will say that the backtesting ability is invaluable if you are a beginning trader, well worth the cost of the s/w, provided you have the ability to write and test systems. You do have to be able to get historical intraday data from somewhere though, and in my experience it was not that easy to use Omega.