Recently TS rolled out their Cash FX platform. This was indeed a dissapointment, and thats coming from a diehard TS fan. I bought into the TS for the automation and this is a let down but not nearly as big as the lack of a "Universal Account" IF you go forward and with the FX account you cant get cross margining thru the two platforms. You literally have to wire money back and forth 2 cover margin if your not juiced up in both accounts. This shud b a seamless structure where 1 account covers all trading since it appears that TS wants 2 become a trading supermarket. And the web site trading is a throwback 2 the 90's........ come on. TS is better then this and they need to prove it by really putting something together. The next move for them seems 2 b "Cash Bonds" (I have no information on this just seems to be a natural progression) I wont fall victim 2 opening a third account within the same firm so I can trade those.........
Don't insult ET member's intelligence! Your "Better synchronization between strategy trades and real-world trades" is a joke! There is no way to back test reliably other then verify Inside Bid/Ask/BidSize/AskSize records versus strategy limit orders! Rather than feed us with your marketing bullshit get off your FAT ASS and fix it!
So far, TS does allow their clients to access intraday charts for futures unless they subscribe to real-time data. (All TS clients can get daily charts.) I would like to see TS allow their clients to access intraday futures charts on a delayed basis for those futures exchanges to which they have not subscribed. That would be useful to traders who focus on stocks but want to get an idea what futures have been doing. You can get free delayed charts (and even some free real-time charts) for futures on the web. Why not allow TS customers -- who pay for the platform -- to get delayed futures charts on TS?
Backtesting and autotrading with dynaorder with both esignal, and TS2000 with esignal data, maybe others. Max
Not so. You have to have all of that data in Global Server of course, easy to get with the esignal active x plug in and esignal data. Max
Thanks Michael for the update on TS8. These are very welcomed improvements and my automated systems will benefit nicely from the changes. Bob
From the link MichaelD provided: Better Synchronization Between Strategy Trades and Real-World Trades TradeStation 8 now gives you the option of having a strategy report a non-historical trade as filled only if that trade was filled in the real-world. By "non-historical trade" does this mean that if we are trading a system in real time, the strategy fills on a chart will now be synchronized with the trade manager?
Agreed, TS is stable enough for autotrading, the workspaces are beautiful, the data is rock solid (I found one instance of bad data in a month) and Easy Language is great. I have not really found the great need for portfolio testing that everybody seems to think they need. Traderssoft.com also has some portfolio tools for Tradestation, probably a lot cheaper than RINA. I really could use the B/A capabilities however, but for the meantime I am very happy. Max
Yes. There is a new tab in the strategy properties dialog named "Automation" and in that tab there is a setting where you can select how the strategy determines when a live ("non-historical") order should be filled. You can have the strategy fill orders based simply on price activity (this is the way that strategies fill in versions 7.2 and prior, basically when a tick comes in at your stop or limit price the strategy fills the order) or you can have the strategy fill the order only if it's been filled in the real-world (i.e. the strategy doesn't try and determine if the the order should be filled, but waits for confirmation from the TradeManager that the order was filled). I've noticed that several persons in this thread have commented on the availability of bid and ask data. While it is true that we don't currently allow you to access this historically from a chart we do have two functions, CurrentBid and CurrentAsk, that will return the inside bid and inside ask when your strategy is evaluating on a real-time bar. In addition there is a "Strategy Automation" function category that contains several functions that allow you to place your strategy orders into the market using the same advanced features that are available on TradeStation's Order Bar. You can have your strategy limit order "pegged" to the inside or you can send them using a price discretion are just a couple of examples. These functions are available in 7.1 and 7.2.
That is a good beginning, but here is my [still] problem with this. It renders backtesting suspect when done on data with no bid/ask. The fact that you have added this for realtime purposes clearly says that you find it of importance, or that your customers are demanding it. The fact however that you are not storing bids and asks in your data warehouse means that, at least at this point, you do not want to explode the amount of disk space and computing overhead involved, to say nothing of the extra bandwidth required to send the extra data over the Internet. I can think of more reasons why you would not store bid and ask and make it available in a system test, but those are probably not them, so I will keep them to myself at this time. All in all, congratulations on moving TradeStation in the right direction... nitro