Good grief. Does your brain run on pure adrenalin? One second?? If I were to breathe every second I would be hyperventilating. That said with Sierra chart you can have 1 sec, 5 sec, 1m, 2m, 5, 15, side by side (if your screen real estate is big enough LOL) and so on ad nauseum. I would suggest you might consider using SIERRA CHART with DENALI data feed combined with TETON routing. These options cost a little (not too bad) but I think you will find the combination to your liking. Like I said you can have several TF charts side by side. You have to find a broker that will offer these options. AMP should. I ain't sponsored...I ain't sponsored..I'm not sponsored by any of the above mentioned in my posts!
For scalping you want to look at Jigsaw. It is specifically made for Order Flow and Limit Order Book trading and it is popular with pros. I think that the latest version has heatmap, but not sure. I think it can be synced with NinjaTrader and BookMap.
I like IBKR. That it has a free API and VBA excel sheets, is also nice. Schwab ToS is incredible for charting and also very affordable.
Been number of years, but Ninja Trader worked well, I use to manually use ladder for stop limit entries and watch two tick, one minute, five minute and hourly charts and scalp. Never used stops for exit but used ATM to apply stops on multiple targets.
Depends. What do you trade? - IBKR & TradeStation are best for all tickers, whereas NinjaTrader is more focused on futures Do you value web, desktop, or mobile app? - TradeStation has the best desktop trading software - IBKR / WeBull / RobinHood have the best mobile app Do you want news, financials, all-in-one? - Bloomberg Terminal Every trader has their own preference.
I can comment on Think or Swim since I have used it. I have not used Webull. I'm going to assume you are trading equities/ETFs. ThinkorSwim runs through Schwab which is primarily a PFOF (payment for order flow) model. It's also not easy to do directed route trades via ARCA or NSDQ in ThinkorSwim in a quick fashion. Schwab does allow directed trades, however they do not make it easy to do since it bypasses the PFOF model. HotKeys in ThinkorSwim are also pretty limited. That being said, execution speed is decent for a commission free platform. It's overall relatively easy to learn and use. Most people like the charting in ThinkorSwim. I also don't think the paid brokers offer anything better regarding price movement after you take a trade - which is what people should really be concerned about here. You really should ask where is the price 1 minute and 5 minutes after you take a trade and that will tell you a lot about a brokers handling of your orders. I've used the DAS Trader platform via Cobra trading as well, which is direct access. They are basically an introducing broker and run your trades through Wedbush or Interactive Brokers. While DAS Trader is a very nice and customizable platform, I'm not impressed with the price movements after the trade especially since I'm paying commissions with that broker. I tried every route on DAS Trader and none of them seemed to be better than the other routes (direct routes and market maker routes). All the big brokers try to advertise about price improvements and execution speeds, but the reality is none of that matters if the market maker taking the opposite side of your 1000 share trade dumps 20000 shares onto your buy order and pulls bids to cause a price drop so they can rebuy them at a lower price. You still end up with the short end of the stick. Scalping used to be easy back during Covid, but it's not nearly as easy now. The brokers with commissions will try to advertise about collecting rebates via directed trades, it's really nonsense because you'll experience adverse price movement to get your order filled to collect those rebates and the rebates tend to get eliminated by the commissions you pay. The thing that helped the most was keeping track of my average purchase price of the shares if I layer into a trade and how quickly I got in the money because you'll see that it is very difficult to be on the correct side of the trade from the entry. It also helped me determine which broker executed my trade most efficiently to get me in the money the quickest. I hope others will share their thoughts on short timeframe price movements after taking a trade, but I have found very little discussion about it for some reason. If someone finds a broker that can execute a trade where price will continue in the same direction the trade was heading before they got in the trade, please let me know because I don't think a broker like that exist. P.S. I saw someone mentioned about Ross Cameron in one of the other post - remember he is always the first one into the trade and then has an entire chatroom of followers that try to do the same thing as him when the reality is they drive the price up and he exits. There's always going to be a delay from when he takes the trade until the other chatroom people can get in on that trade too. I've only seen a few of his Youtube videos, but this was my take on his approach. He also ended up getting charged and fined by the FTC, which should tell you something. I read through the case an he spent more on advertising his trading courses than he made trading.