I guess I should have understood this when I saw REFCO in big letters on the TradesStationSecurities account forms. Their ES, NQ, YM, etc trades all go through REFCO/Lind|Waldock and then to GLOBEX or ACE. This is a serious limitation of a "dayish" type trader, no? Now I understand why even my market orders have taken seconds to in some cases minutes to be filled/confirmed. (In all fairness, TS has adjusted me to where I should have been executed at.))
Then what good are speed keys I was expecting instantaneous fills on market order like Pointdirex and Protrader. How does this work anyhow?
It won't happen. There is talk of making TS orders direct access, but that hasn't happened yet. BTW, their ES charts are now straight from the exchanges, but YM are still not. To trade right now you have to run a second prog called TradesStation Futures to enter orders. It's only okay at best. You will not get "instantaneous" fills with TS6. TS7 will have the trading interface as part of the prog, so you won't have to run a second one. But there is still no word when it will become direct access. HTH.
Ah gosh darnit, That's really disappointing. I thought TS6 would be a better alternative to Protrader. I already have IB for swingtrading, but wanted an alternative to Protrader for scalping. What am I to do? Guess I'll stick with Protrader, unless someone else has a better suggestion.
I'm actually in the process of opening an IB account for shorterm ES trading. Are you saying TWS is not very good for that? What's been your experience? Thanks a lot!
IB is good, don't get me wrong. But I only use it for swing trading. I need lots of charts (up to 30) on a 3 minute basis, Nasdaq futures, SnP futures, several L2's with time and sales prints, the account window open all the time, pending sales, and an ability to have the charts linked to the L2 windows, scrolling on the L2 for programmable stocks, speed keys and order routing on speed keys, etc. IB is great if you don't need most of the above. Protrader is great, but their tech support is less than desirable in my opinion. That's why I was looking elsewhere.