Well, I don't know if you'll like TS. You really have to trade a fair amount to get the platform for free.
It's really not that much, I suppose, but I forget how much it is exactly. I think it may be 5000 shares a month, or 50 options, or perhaps 20 round turns on Futures.
So if you trade 5000 shares one month, & 20 contracts the next it's free both months. But if you fall below those levels across the accounts then it's a hundred bucks. Trading part time I don't know if I'd make it. As it stands I easily make it now, but I might trade 20 or 25 contracts in one day if I'm having a bad day. If I'm having a good day perhaps 10 or 12.
Except for that it's fine. I was in Manhattan yesterday & today at TS seminars. Strategy testing, Automation & whatnot. They like you to trade. The more the better. You do get a slight discount if you trade a lot of contracts, I usually hit it half way through the month, but it's not too bad anyway.
A couple of annoying things; I don't position trade there because of two issues. They say they are going to put in GTC orders but do not have it now. So you have to put in Stops every day. Also, in some markets I hold positions for months.....markets like Sugar, Metals, Soybeans & I won't do it there not just because of the lack of GTC orders (so far) but because they have a carry charge of ten cents per contract per day. This destroys the discount for me. I've held contracts for months. I've owned July Sugar for five weeks & might hold it until June. That would be over 100, 120 trading days or an additional 10 or 12 dollars a contract. That's no longer a discount. I know it's not the Clearing Firm, because the other broker uses the same firm.
It's a small thing to complain about, but coupled with the lack of GTC orders I get the feeling the pressure is to churn. The Strategy Automation end is designed for trading often as well.
All of that aside, naturally you "should" be making enough money to discount these small issues. Also, because I daytrade a fair amount of contracts the numbers are small. But it's a penny ante thing, charging to hold a contract overnight.
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Having said all of that, the platform is really good. The approaches you can go off on seem limitless. I just wish I was 40 years younger & willing to analyze the daylights out of everything I can imagine.
I've found some flaws, but you can even load data from symbols not used anymore. For example if a stock was taken over in a merger 10 years ago there will be historical data available up until it stopped trading.
They have Tick data going back 6 months. All data can be downloaded very rapidly. It takes third place in the pipe, after orders & current chart updating, but I've found historical data still downloads very rapidly.
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If you enjoy programming you can come up with wild permutations by designing your own strategies, Indicators & Automations using EasyLanguage. If you aren't a programmer there are dialogue boxes preloaded with verified EasyLanguage building blocks, most with user definable parameters. For example taking the midpoint of a bar instead of the Close of a bar to define a MA.
You can rapidly switch from Trading Stocks to options to Futures to Forex. From your IRA to your Futures account to your Joint account to that sweet little account you've never told your wife about.
It supports multiple monitors, Vista, and you can work on it offline to develop strategies while trading on it live on another machine.
It's really a monster. However, I don't know if I'd want to use it trading part time. It will take a bit of a learning curve to zoom with it. But amongst others I've used Man, one of your brokers, and it definitely will give you more of an edge than a broker like Man will. Good Fills too, but I guess that has more to do with O'Brien (the Clearing Firm) than TS. On the other hand, on the Stock side they are self-clearing & I have no complaints about the fills there either.
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As far as other platforms that you can backtest on designed for swing trades I don't know of any. I used TS years ago before they became a full service broker & pretty much stuck to QCharts ever since with a few tries on E-Signal. I guess E-Signal's platform was viable for backtesting but of course there is a fixed fee there.
I still use QCharts but it's on the way out. I think it's a weak sister to E-Signal now, & I've found a lot of flaws in it since they forced over to the latest version, not the least of which was destroying my old workspaces. I suppose there was a warning that they were going to drop the old symbols & move to to E-Signal symbols last month, but I didn't get it. Rebuilding all my workspaces was a royal pain.
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A couple of other quirks about TS. If you don't have Live data for Sugar, for example, you can't trade it.
If you are selling a ten-lot of Options at a limit & move the price there is a fee. Another penny ante charge.
It's all small change in the long run but I'll hit a hundred or a hundred and fifty in ES Commissions alone on a given day and get a few of these nickel & dime charges & it just rubs me the wrong way.
There are a few other goofy things that don't come to mind offhand but that's the general overall impression.
tradestation.com
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EDIT
Oh, the other thing I was trying to remember was Commodity Options.
To trade those you have to have a separate Futures Account, a Pit Account. You can easily move money back & forth between the accounts, but Commodity Options orders must go through the Pit Account. So you can Trade a Futures Contract using the Electronic Futures Account, then write an Option using the Pit Futures Account.
I don't know if that's bizarre or not. Perhaps it helps to contain costs, but again my other broker uses the same Clearing House & there I do it all in one account. |
