Pierre,
I used to be an active intraday stock trader and I suppose early on I might have liked to be able to 'fire' faster, although to be perfectly honest I'm sure that would have, in my case, added more fuel to the overtrading fire.
Many many thousands of trades later, at least for me, I find that analysis and planning is more important than being able to pull the trigger quickly.
Also, the setups I trade allow me time to place orders in a more leisurely manner - even if I am trading off of a 5 minute or even 1 minute chart in fast futures markets.
My guess is that it will take a while before various compromises are wrung out of any charting / execution system that TradeStation Tech comes up with.
Whatever the motivation, I hope they get it right. The concept appeals to me. Frankly, maintaining my own data is simply a distraction. That's not how I make money.
There are pros and cons to it. Most of the time, my data is much cleaner than anything you'll find from Quote.com or any of the other charting suppliers, especially since so many of them use S&P Comstock and their data has been just crap lately.
Not to mention Quote.com which can't even quickly fix many data errors that are reported - frequently it takes them a weekend or two to get around to it.
So if a bad tick gets through my software's filters, it takes me about 30 seconds to remove it. Not a bad compromize.
Also, the more complex the software on my end, the greater the chance it'll crash during market hours. I like the idea of the complex computing being done on the server side.
Again, there are pros and cons to a sever-based system. Quote.com, a great example here, has thousands of posts on their thread indicating problems - and on a daily basis too. Not just sporadic events.
Crashing is a nightmare that costs me real dollars, sometimes lots of them, in the course of a day. The simpler the program on my end, the less likely I need visit that hell.
Well, I'm not sure what would cause a system to crash so often these days. I honestly have not had my trading systems crash in years. Not since TradeStation 2000i first came out (and SP1, SP2 and SP3). Ever since SP4 and SP5 TradeStation itself has been rock solid.
Plus your system stability will really depend a lot on the underlying hardware and operating system. I can't stress enough how beneficial moving to Windows 2000 Professional, coupled with at least a P300 with 256 or better 512MB of RAM, would be.
For anyone trading for a living, these types of investments will have long term payoffs in system stability and lack of frustration for a user.
As an example of stability, my Tradestation data collection machine typically runs for 4,5,6 months at a time without being restarted, and I don't recall ever having to restart it because it was unstable, its usually driven by me wanting to make changes to the box or applications on it.
At any rate, I'm not suggesting that linked charting and order execution might not be useful for some. |
