This is a "heads up" to ET members who may be moving to Tradestation. I went out and bought a new computer to trade my system, and then closed my primary trading account with Man Financial so I could transfer to Tradestation. My mistake!! They received my application about 10 days ago, and still haven't approved it. Today they have sent me a new application for their futures clearing agent (O'Brien). Same one that I filled that out and faxed it to their offices a week ago! Called up my "broker" to see whats wrong and all I get is "well its a problem with the back office, theres nothing I can do". My first impression is these folks are "out to lunch". Knowing what I know now, I am tempted to buy an older version of tradestation on ebay and take my account over to IB. Anyway if any of you are contemplating a change, be prepared to wait, and wait............and wait. Steve46
In defense of Tradestation: I believe they are in the process of changing their futures clearing firm from Lind-Waldock/Refco to R.J. O'Brien this very week. That could be slowing them down. I have to admit that I don't use their brokerage services even though I have an account. Their charts and programming facilities are great (that's why I have the account), but IB is a better (and cheaper) broker for me.
In defence of Tradestation: I dont know why you have had these problems. When I phoned the sales ppl I was sent a link to the pdf forms. I printed the forms, completed them, and then faxed them off. The accounts (equities and futures) were created very quickly. I am extremely happy. No complaints whatsoever. A happy customer.
I was surprised myself. I trade a trust account so they may have had some problems with the additional paperwork. To their credit, I did receive a phone call this morning advising me that they were almost done processing my application. If they finish by Monday, it will have been 10 days.
Steve, I think you just happened to snag them at a bad time...as was mentioned they are transitioning from LW to RJ O'brien. I have been using them for about a year now and am fairly pleased. However, I did get a request yesterday to re-fax a form over to them that I had already signed. However, this is the only time where it looked like they didn't have it together. Hopefully your experience will improve! Good luck, MYD
They've completely dropped the ball with my attempt to change from an equities to a a futures account: Lost documents, broken promises, failure to respond in a timely manner to e-mails and calls. I haven't the slightest idea at this point what's going on. I'm a longtime client of Tradestation - since "before the beginning" - and I had the impression that they were trying very hard to improve customer service in all respects, but this experience has been terrible. When I also read in various places about all the problems they've had with TS 7.1, I'm glad the installation process failed when I was prompted to try it the other night. At least they promised to waive platform fees for me this month.
I own Platinum 2000i. I was sure it was the biggest waste of money I had ever spent. Lo and behold, I now have 2ki running with IQFeed and Dynastore for IQFeed. Now, for $50/M (+$120/YR for DS for IQ), I have: 1) TS 2) A good feed 3) RadarScreen 4) OptionStation For backup, Medved Quotetracker + IB as a feed. Cost, minimal for QuoteTracker per year. My only complaint? TS Symbol Universe for TS2K is WAY out of date, and AFAIK, it is not being updated. This is more of a nuissance than anything else, as I can enter the symbols by hand. One thing that I am pleasantly surprised by is that this stuff (TS, external software, Global Server, etc) used to crash all the time. I used to blame it on TS. But once I made the change to a stable OS, made the change to the OS that allows more allocation of heap to TS (thanks kymar !), got some serious computing power, and gobs of RAM, this thing is ROCK SOLID. Now, if I can figure out how to run Global Server on it's own machine in order to further stabilize data collection, I would be one happy man. I remember there being a way to do this, some registry key...I will figure it out... nitro