Worth switching from IB to Tradestation for the platform?

Envision you have a few contracts laid on and your power goes out, your computer crashes....whatever.....

You call IB and the phone just rings....but hey, your making 5 percent on your money.....even though they don't answer and the market just dropped five points...

You call TradeStation, they answer after two rings and you give your account number and you say make me flat....and they do....

So what's most important?...Are you guys retirees looking for interest on your savings or traders?....

 

I have never had any trouble getting out of a trade with IB.

Smart traders are always looking for ways to maximize returns, if you not then you will soon join the 90% who fail at this business.

Cash is not a bad place to be right now.

 

My point is not whether you should be with TS, IB or anyone else. It is that you must choose the brokerage that provides the opportunity to make the most money and that interst rate on free cash is far down the list behind charting, execution speed and reliability, customer service etc.

I don't keep "free cash" in a trading account. I keep the amount of cash necessary to provide the buying power I need. Excess cash gets transferred out. If I have a bad run and need more buying power I transfer cash in.

A 4% difference on $100k is $4,000 annually. If I am using that buying power ($400k) every day it is providing a MUCH greater return than $4k. If I am not using somewhere near to that buying power on a regular basis then I don't need that much cash in the account.

 

Isnt one of the primary differences between TS and other brokers is that they dont offer a "free cash" eod sweep. Many other borkers do and transfer the free cash out for you eod.

 

Do you think that 4X buying power is free? you should check their margin rates may be near 7%

 

Hey its 99.95 to use the system as a brokerage client, that doenst include all the other streamign options.

 

Anyone have an idea as to when they are going to roll out TS 8.2 ??

 

what are they adding to 8.2?

 

anything significant to look forward to?

 

The only thing I understand they are adding that I am interested in is the ability to trade off of a Continuous Futures Contract w/out having to go through the 2 data stream workaround that they currently have. It was listed as "Coming Soon" about 6 months ago and after posting on in the Tradestation.com forums I came to find out that it wasn't being released until 8.2