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Strategies & Market Trends : DAYTRADING Fundamentals -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Eric P who wrote (5266)	11/8/1999 8:10:00 AM
From: d. alexander	Respond to of 18137

Eric; will do when I get a mo. Am working on getting some history (not all!) on the thread. BUT, even a quick look tells me that I'm not up to speed skillwise. Also, there was a moment when I did have to decide - should I switch to one of the RealTick brokers or go up to 2000i. Once the choice is made, you still didn't find out what using RealTick (& one of those brokers) might do for you, especially orderwise! later d.

To: Eric P who wrote (5266)	11/8/1999 8:40:00 PM
From: d. alexander	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 18137

>>>I haven't looked into TradeStation for several years. Perhaps you could tell us a little more about it. Got Trade Station 4.0 in May '97, essentially to do eod analytics which I had been doing on Worden. RT was DBC which I got free as a beta tester of their internet feed. So I used that software for intraday. >>> What are some of the features that you find most useful in TradeStation? Oversimplification from a non-techie. Data delivery via the internet seems to have created a kind of program schism. Programs where you get your history off your hard drive & programs where you get it off a server. Plus the feed schism. Always on & building (charts) vs pluck them off the server at any time. Omega has mediated well between these to (attempt to) deliver the best of both. The elegance & complexity which the hard drive enables, with the rigidity of that system (esp. of the always-on build!) tempered by recourse to the internet for RT data & nightly history. I got 2000i when it first came out (the so-called upgrade was not so expensive) & it was awful. As they picked up the pieces, you became more aware of what it & they were doing. TradeWind, which I also use, is a hybrid build-system. The intradays are beautiful, with the data coming in BUT you cannot (as a frequent trader) get a daily chart off them, because you haven't built it - because you change the charts every day. With TradeStation there is the flexibility of changing stocks at will, without losing the build. The database (also by no means fixed) updates every night from the web. You start out the day with selected stocks connected. At any time during the day, you can activate whatever from your database, or look at yesterday's daily to decide whether to activate. What you can't do is get a chart that you don't have in your database even though DBC, the internet feed, has it on their server. So you right click on the DBC quote page & get it there. Obviously this is not good, but they all stick here! At the same time I get an immediate 1 minute from TradeWind. But have to note down the symbol & add it to the database pm if I want to keep on with it. This kind of describes the experience of handling TradeStation, not at all how to trade with it, which I would guess people already know how to do (better than I). The 2000i workspace setup is tabbed for flipping, rather than opening & closing or minimizing windows as with the eSig software or TStn 4.0. I like this better. I set my tabs up as alphabetical (they could be anything of anyone's invention), one 5 min & one daily per tab. Redone every night & modified during the day. Large monitor has 12 one minutes. I can change the one minutes according to what goes on in the tabs. I use (prefer) the eSig quote page on another small monitor, & dragged out a really old monitor for the Ameritrade orders. Hope this gives some idea. d.