Your experience with TS will likely be determined by how you use it. If you only have charts and use some indicators provided with the platform, the latency is not horrible, except times of heavy volume. During high volume periods, the ES is routinely 2 handles behind TT. If you are planning on using any data intensive algs, TS will routinely hang up for several minutes with slightest amount of volume increase. It is great as a sketch pad for writing systems and as a backup charting platform. For serious intra-day trading, it just does not hold up.
TS has many positives. Good platform, EL is a big plus and fees are competitive. To each his own, as they say. Plenty of complainers and bitter ex-customers here on Elite. Take their input with a major grain of salt. If I didn't know what it takes to be a trader, I would think a good chunk of Elite posters were raised by wolves - no civility.
yeah - this is the point where things get a bit grey.... Fortune Teller and HSC.1775 are adamant that TradeStation is not up to the task. There are always such strong negative opinions. But like livinlife says, you need a healthy skepticism to realize where the negativity is coming from. But it is a shame that there are no posts coming in along the lines of: I am a high velocity trader who trades off ticks and I have no troubles with TS and love it. See that is the problem, no posts like that. Confidence starts to sink about TS, glug, glug glug, bottom of the sea. To clarify: I am a discretionary trader and I usually monitor only two symbols: ES and NQ. I have very intricate charts with highly customized analysis that is all self programmed. I use always two time frames in a single graph, usually hiding the longer, with analytics running off both. There is some heavy computation running off the tick stream that generates discrete entry/exits. However, I do automate the money management side of the equation. I do not trade with stops, but have an auto exit based on net monetary loss that involves various margin/atr/net liquidation value calculations. In short any algorithms that are automated are to do with money managing the portfolio. Moving to TS would involve rewriting all my systems to be able to see if TS can handle it. This is a lot of work and a major investment. Please if there is anyone who uses TS successfully in a similar manner can you pipe up and say something here? Otherwise I am tending to caution....
Here's another one I am sure everyone has seen: You open up TS and the last price on the Martrix is way down below the bid column. So you close TS and re-open it and it is still the same. Doesn't happen very often but when it does it is weird.
Everyone uses TradeStation differently, and as you can see there are positive and negative posts alike. So what if someone posted exactly what you wanted to hear? His confidence in TradeStation does not translate to how you would re-code your system and how you use it. I have used TradeStation for fulltime trading for two years now. I suggest you just open the account (with small/min deposit) to try it out yourself. No one else had coded EL the same way as your system. If you are still cautious, then don't use TradeStation. Regards,
So you don't want to be given the real picture? You should of asked for a pretty picture instead. Everything I have stated is true, so why is that considered negative? Because I didn't paint the pretty picture you wanted?
I agree. It's the only way you can find out for yourself whether TS is up to task for your situation.
you are starting to give your otherwise useful comments a definite flavor.... unlike yourself I believe that more than one opinion is often useful when one is looking for the real picture - otherwise you end up with a heavily biased sample from a group of people with identifiable traits.... let's wait and see if anyone with anything positive to say about TS (as opposed to something negative) chips in. About the "sign up and give it a twirl" suggestions: I am simply looking for a degree of confidence before committing to that. Blind dating isn't my scene....
this thread is totally stupid......the opening poster only wants to hear WHAT HE WANTS TO HEAR...........kinda reminds me of todays economic forecasters.
yeah... I wanna hear how great TS is, which is why I am asking for opinions, because I really have signed up already. I mean why even post here? I really do want to hear from people who actually use TS, not idiots who want to comment on the thread!