Hey Guys... I was considering changing brokers from TD Ameritrade to one of the above, mainly due to order execution speed and comission fees per trade. I just have af ew questions. For TradeStation, if I place enough trades / or if i pay the 100$ a month, does it contain a good feed data package ? Especially tick-by-tick data ? IF I wanted to use NinjaTrader, would IB be the best pick + ZenFire for the data feed? I trade stocks now, but plan on doing futures once I reach my goal.
I use TradeStation. I love it. Trade 5000 shares a month to have the platform fee waived. 1000 shares = $8.00 (First 500 shares 0.01, over 500 it's 0.006). They charge per share. So basically $40 commission worth in trading a month, you can use their platform for free. The data feed is pretty good. I have used it since 2007. 2 years now. Only 1 outage (maybe an hour?) from what I remember.
I guess you never traded futures and been in a position when the platform went down and the phones went unanswered for 3 hours! I heard the Dallas Cowboys are looking for a cheerleader.
If I do the 40$ comission worth .... how good is the data feed ? Is it like ZenFire / or IQFeed Speed /quality ?
Sorry I missed that experience. I must say while I use TradeStation everyday (mostly for charting), it is not my primary trading platform. No need for sarcasm. I am only presenting my experience. You apparently have very different experiences with TradeStation. Why don't you just present it to the person who asked the question instead of beating up on someone who was trying to be helpful?
If you're going to do futures, skip IB. Go with Mirus, Amp Futures, Global futures or Velocity. You can do Ninja with a Zenfire feed or with a TT feed. Mirus and AMP both give you a free live license to use with Ninja. BUT the key is for basic trading, meaning no OCO and no trailing stops or automated strategies. You'll have to pay $60/month for that. It's not necessary if you manually trade. The free license is good enough. It gives you unlimited use of static DOM and chart trader. IB is ok but their feed misses ticks every so often because they take a snapshot every 200msec or so. I've seen highs and lows off on 1 min to 5 min bars. Also, IB's platform is more complicated than it needs to be for futures trading. What's more, IB has high intraday margins (50% of overnight) which can be suspended at any time. Usually when the VIX spikes more than 50% from a norm. Whereas, Mirus, AMP and Velocity have $500 intraday margins. What that means is if you have $2500 in your account and you buy 5 contracts, if it goes against you 1 tick, your position will be liquidated because $500 is the minimum per contract.
Thkank Dman, What if I wanted to trade mostly stocks, using tick-data , which one would be the the best ?
I have only used TradeStation so I don't have any comparison of its speed/quality to other brokers. It serves me well. Here is picture of my computers and screens: http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=43661&perpage=6&pagenumber=428 I have 3 TradeStation logins because I like the TradeStation charts. 3 different desktops, each have either 4 monitors or 6 monitors. At any moment I will be getting data feed for about 20 charts on the same computer. Some of the charts are tick charts. All seem to work well in 99% of my trading days. Again as I said, TradeStation is not my primary trading platform because I don't like the way they change orders. Cascade menus. Too slow. I use RealTick as my primary trading platform because order placing and changing is fast.
They are all futures and currency only brokers. Zenfire and TT don't disseminate stock data acroos their feed, only futures and currencies: http://www.zen-fire.com/index.html http://www.tradingtechnologies.com/ When you're ready for futures, your best bet is to go with a futures only broker rather than a mutli-asset class broker like IB, Tradestation, or MB trading.
I've been customer of both and I would go with IB ( futures in my case ). - You cannot trade calendar spreads with TS - TS datas are bad and you cannot see implied prices in order book so their matrix is pretty much worthless. - TS cannot automate algos that make money, only crappy indicator ones. The only bad thing about IB is the charting package.