Laputa, Thank you very much for all the information and testimony. I am going to give TS a shot before trying someone else mainly because I already have the fund wire in process and I may as well give it a shot.
There is nothing wrong with going with TS as long as you're not a rapid-fire scalper. I use it for swing and position trading, and it can be used intraday as long as you are careful to model the slippage accurately. RoughTrader
Hi SarahG, I moved to a platform called QuantDeveloper (ww.smartquant.com). It isn't I can't do the same thing with tradestation, just that it is much more reliable with QuantDeveloper than TS in short time frame trading. Cheers
Regarding frozen quotes, here's a good example. Right now it's just into the premarket, and I'm looking at ESCL. It's trading at about 5.70. The ask columns are correct, but there are a ton of quotes from yesterday lined up on the bid from 6.00 all the way up to 7.66. It's almost impossible to trade like this.
As soon as I get ready to call customer support, the problem disappears. But I have this problem every day. It's usually during the regular market...if a stock moves, for example, down 50 cents in a minute, the ecn bids will still remain above the (correct) ask, even though they're stale quotes. They'll disappear after a minute or so...or if you log out and log back in, but you can't be doing that all day. I have this problem on both computers, and clearing out the cache like they suggest doesn't help. That's the biggest downside to TS. And a pretty big one.
I have TS and IB on different screens. If it gets to where I can't look at that IB software I switch to TS to give my psyche a rest. Once you get past the learning curve TS is very rewarding software to work with and I don't have problems with quotes [currently only from the CBOT] or the brokerage.
Does not need to be. Have been using TS2000i for, what 6+ years and am using a third party datavendor through a third party data interface. Works fine. And as broker am using Interactive Brokers. In this way not locked in with a broker or software package. Unless you are into the extreem complex (and short-time) stuff there is no need for the latest version of TradeStation. After all human fear and greed are about the oldest emotions around and have not changed for thousands of years. Thing to remember is this: the shorter the timeframe the more you compete with the professionals / robots and the harder it gets. (PS one of the biggest advantages for me is that I can trade on a dial-up line - have even been trading with a 19K connection without any problems) Maria
Maria, Would you trade a Managed Account using your discretionary system with 40K+ trades with a PF of 16.5? Thanks, Alex
Maria, Are you able to backtest historical data through your 3rd party data vendor with 2000i or buy it separately.