Tradestation sounds real expensive to me - the 20% more for stocks and 60% more for futures - and i know when i called them - that they sounded like a software seller playing at being a broker
Actually for the value that TradeStation6 offers in the way of professional charting / backtesting software and datafeed the commission schedule isn't that prohibitive IMO. Just for the record if they charge $100 for the charting & quotes (and if that is what they are really worth) the breakeven point at which you would marginally lose for trading more volume would be doing over 50K shares of stock or over 33 EMinis monthly when you compare the rates directly to IB.
Good deal - but they are desperate for market share and quickly. If they have to clear through BS and Refco - that's a cost...plus they will have to cover ECN costs and execution costs....and ECNs are only cheap if you have the volume in the first place. They are going to need many customers to give up real-tick and commit to $100 pm. I guess the trickis to keep a close eye on their quarterly results....I wonder if they let you borrow there own stock for a short!!
The only backtesting I would ever be concerned with is intraday , tick by tick backtesting. And as far as I know, this currently does not exist.
I'm going to check these guys out as a serious replacement for Cybertrader. Bet others will do the same. Ticket charges are for dweebs. PS I Use IB for all my trades. Cyber only for quotes
Well I think we could see ticket charges disappear within 3 years at major brokerages, I recently came across an ad for a Realtick broker also charging a cent or so per share with a $5 min. , I think it's TN, not sure.
Check out the info on advanced order capabilities. Pretty cool. http://www.tradestationsecurities.com/tradingplatform/advanced_orders.shtm
I like their large order handling concept. I have continuously found placing large orders has problems with moving the market away from the order. Maybe IB could look at this type of functionality. Catoosa
As far as datafeed and charting capabilites go, are they at least as good as Qcharts? I wouldn't mind dumping Q, but I don't want to go backwards.