Why do you Like Tradestation Program and Brokerage

I can find plenty of information (OLD mind you) about why people HATE Tradestation. In general, on the net more people complain than give great reviews) Just my experience for you statisticians.

I am seeking information about the Good of TradeStation.

Please dont hold back. If you love the service and had an issue, tell me of it and how it was resolved. I am looking to move Up and would like real world opinions.

I'd prefer those who have experience with TS 8 as I wont be using an older version of the software should I join the Tradestation team.

The rep I have spoken to has been quick to return emails and phone calls. (I know of the honeymoon period) I want after the honeymoon happiness. Trading success, platform success, etc....

One guy keeps pointing us to his issue circa 2005. In the world of computers old info is just that, old info. Things can change or maybe they don't. I am not interested in 2005 experiences. I am interested in current HAPPY tradestation users.

Please help a fellow trader out.

Thanks.

 

people who use tradestation charting (or have in the past) are almost universally in agreement that it is the best.

tradestation as a BROKERAGE on the other hand is apparently not that great, based on what i hear.

i personally chart with quotetracker and use IB for data.

 

Currently I use Quotetracker as well. However after using Tradestation 2000i for charting and running strategies... I like. Now I am interested in going all the way with TS 8 and TS securities for brokerage.

Anybody using the brokerage????? I have done google searches up the wazoo and cant find any detailed reviews (recent) of their brokerage service.

Help. Post your positive or good experiences here.....

 

Pros and cons on TS.

The best charts period.

Back testing is easy but makes quite a bit of mistakes on tick data. When the real money hits the tape expect some real issues. An example is a trading system running and it executes a trade then you get stopped out. You shut down the system and turn it back on just to see there was no signal. It sucks but it’s a lot better then learning c++ and maintaining your own data.

Matrix is great for globex futures but is terrible for trading any equities. The worst fills and I question if they are taking the other side of the trade. Personally I am using IB for equities. Works great! The short list may I say it is short. QQQQ, DIA, OIH can’t get them! A major plus on the globex side is if you put in a stop and your connection or computer goes down. Don’t worry, it is on the book and you are safe. On the equities side don’t ever use stops. Bad ticks will trigger it. If you place a stop for a NYSE stock they don’t allow the specialist to handle it. So once your stop is hit then they send a market order. Kind of late for that. As for smart order routing of stocks. I used to consistently wait 3, 4, 5 minutes for a fill. OMG I am offering at 50.14 and the bids are as high as 50.50. Can’t get filled for #$%@.

The Quote or Radar Screen has a ton of bells and whistles but you can’t filter like esignal. So I am using esignal for quotes. You can you any indicator or time frame on the quotes like MA’s or stochastic. It’s like having a few hundred charts with out taking up space.

Time and sales suck and the ticker needs help too. No bid ask data showing where the prints went off. The ticker only moves at one speed that changes the prints while it is moving.

They also don’t show all of the option contracts and don’t allow trading in penny increments.

Customer service is not that great. There are only a few people in the company that know what they are doing. So the basic answer to something they don’t know is “you can’t do that”! I have learned the hard way.

Finnaly TS is very limited to advanced strategies and a lot of symbols. If you run to many robots or have too many symbols expect your processor to be over run. It’s not your computer just the limitations of trade station. Running 10 systems requires 5 minutes to get the software started.

Overall I would say don’t trade equities there! Futures are great! The software is excellent but not designed for tape reading or advanced automated trading. I am very happy with it overall except what I mentioned previously.

 

Thanks. Any more???

I dont trade futures, currently I am ONLY trading equities... If That helps....

 

Best thing at tradestation:

*Charting: 10 points
*Performance report on trades made: Excellent tool to find out parameters on our own way of trading. What we are doing right and what we are doing wrong.
*Pretty friendly way to place orders on the Matrix. Easy way to look P/L.



The bad ones:

*Cust Services suck when you already have an account: They treat you 5stars when you're a prospective customer, one you become a customer with an account they don't care about u. I mean client services can leave you 30 to 40 minutes on the phone.
On the other hand, I had good experience when i called tradingdesk they handled any problem quickly.

*Platform its good but sometimes its down or have issues with servers, i mean, its not up and running OK the entire month (like others).

*Webpage account management doens't exist. If you have a fut accounts you don't have a decent acc management on TS webpage (like others, ie: MBT or IB.

 

I've used TradeStation for 3 years. I now prefer MultiCharts.

 

TradeStation charting: 6
MultiCharts: 8 and climbing.

 

as a user of both TradeStation and MultiCharts I can definately say that MC has the edge over TS charting.

TS charting is excellent and intuitive, but there are still a few major issues with TS charting:

lack of range bars functionality
lack of sub-minute granularity for tick data - why can they not stamp tick data with the time AND second it arrived, rather than rounding to minutes???
inability to plot tick and time based graphs in the same chart

For an application that costs a few hundrew bucks, works fully with EasyLanguage and has fixed everything that TS does wrong I'd suggest testing the trial version of MC for 30 days and see if you like it.

 

Thanks for every ones input. I think I will go with IB.

Tradestation is like the the strange woman in proverbs, or the chick on I'm gonna get you sucka. Once you get her home you find out she was a bunch of makeup and fake body parts.

Thanks for the experiences people.

Not to mention does TWS run on mac OSX.

For Mac Charting I prefer InvestorRT. The RTL langugae is very familiar to me, and I love the ability to colorize all the charts and MACD histograms the way I like to read them.


I'd also like to add.... InvestorRT has GREAT customer support. My aftersale experience with them was fantastic. Everything is configurable.

Guess I'll be heading back home.