Tradestation 8.0 - what a disapointment

Plantation FL, March 1, 2004 — TradeStation Group, Inc. (NASDAQ: TRAD) today announced the launch of TradeStation® 8, the next generation of the company's award-winning electronic trading platform for active and institutional traders. TradeStation Group, Inc. is the parent company of the award-winning TradeStation Securities broker-dealer and futures commission merchant (Member NASD, SIPC and NFA), and TradeStation Technologies, the award-winning software development and subscription service company. TradeStation 8 will be rolled out to new clients and the company's existing brokerage and subscriber client base in phases, and in a controlled manner.
Detailed Feature List Available
A complete description of the new features of TradeStation 8 will be available at http://www.tradestation.com later this week. The new features include:
Integrated Direct-Access Options Execution – this enables direct-access options trading from within the TradeStation platform, including the ability to trade single contracts and multi-leg spreads.
Automated Execution of Options Strategies – traders will have the ability to test and automate the execution of options strategies for single contracts.
Enhanced Options Analysis Window – calls and puts are now displayed side by side, it is now easier to create multi-leg spread orders, and there is a new position chart toolbar that can be used to perform “what-if” scenarios.
Market Depth for Options – enables the trader to view the depth of the market for options symbols in the Market Depth window.
Extended Historical Data for Forex – 1½ year historical intraday forex database for popular symbols.
Account Historical Performance – TradeManager Analysis is a powerful new tool that provides an analysis of the performance of one or more specified accounts over a user-specified period; it provides traders with a thorough analysis, with over 100 performance fields, performance graphs, trade graphs and a detailed list of all trades that were made during the specified period.
Cancel/Replace Stop Market Orders – the ability to modify the details of an open stop market order without having to cancel the order and then send a new order in its place; the time-saving Cancel/Replace functionality allows the trader to quickly change the price, quantity or order type.
Trade Size Filtering – the ability to filter the trades that are displayed in the Time & Sales window to display trades only over a certain amount.
Enhanced Access to Research – this enhancement expands the trader's access to research coverage of equities, bonds and mutual funds.

Still no real time coordination between the TradeManager and the Strategies. Means backtested results with limit orders still meaningless.

 

Kinf of funny since there big promotion for a free trade is worth only $60. You pay 5 times that to use there software with all some of the features.

 

TS8 is still behind TS5 regarding charting and strategies that use realtime bid/ask.

Max

 

Max,

Seems like TRAD comes out with just enough new features to keep people coming back for more. Last version was the Matrix and this one looks like it is electronic options trading (presently you have to place option orders over the phone). It's all style and no substance.

Can you imagine auto trading some complex options strategy with limit orders with the strategy filling them and the real market not?

I don't think TRAD is for the serious system trader.

 

The software is very stable but I wouldn't use it with TRAD brokerage, only third party software and IB.

Max

 

It's behind SystemWriter that I had in the late '80s. You could do portfolio testing and batch testing with that very early version.

DS

 

Its amazing how big cheeses like TS do not get one simple thought:

YOU CAN NOT DO DICK WITHOUT AN ABILITY TO WRITE STRATEGIES THAT USE BID AND ASK (PRICES AND SIZES)

Any limit order simulation would fail.
Is that so difficult to understand or its just me?!

 

They think it is just you probably!!

 

I recently spoke to one of the guys at WLD. They told me that B/A system writing capabilities would be available for their new WL developer in 2- 3 months. I'll switch immediately!

 

YOU CAN NOT DO DICK WITHOUT AN ABILITY TO WRITE STRATEGIES THAT USE BID AND ASK (PRICES AND SIZES)

What would it take for TRAD to have this ability? Is it just the masssive amount of data which would be required that makes it prohibitive for them? Or they just don't care?

Does anyone know of any software that presently offers backtesting with this ability?