After 5 yrs, may switch off Tradestation, cheaper alternative?

Good info again. FYI- I use IB's TWS with a little pt-click and a lot of hotkeys, it's fast enough for my purposes to do it that way. I would be very hesitant to switch order execution to a diff. platform given my effectiveness (& profitability) with IB TWS, I don't feel I ever miss trades, especially since I tend to add liquidity so I usually have time to sit on a price.

I'm mainly just looking for a charting/data feed alternative.
 
Quick update so far (comments welcome as usual):
-Got an IQFeed trial going and also added Totalview to my IB Datafeed for a month. I'm surprised that IQ Feed doesn't support Totalview, only the less revealing Openview, that could be an IQ Feed dealbreaker for me.

-I eliminated Amibroker, SierraChart, & Multichart from my search since none of them support Market Depth (I was shocked).

-Ninjatrader has yet to work, it freezes every time I try to load a chart, no other platform has given me this problem. So I may just have to cross it off because it doesn't work.

-Still looking at Ensign, Quotetracker, and will probably look at eSignal

I'm starting to learn that most alternatives really just don't have the ease of use, intuitive chart linking, quick interval changing, and customizable Level II/time & sales info that Tradestation has....but I'm still looking eagerly.
 
Quote from spup345:-Ninjatrader has yet to work, it freezes every time I try to load a chart, no other platform has given me this problem. So I may just have to cross it off because it doesn't work.
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Did you try 6.5 or 7? 6.5 has some issues, but I use the version 7 beta to trade and it seems to work fine, much better than 6.5. But you might not be comfortable using "beta" software.

-Still looking at Ensign, Quotetracker, and will probably look at eSignal
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Esignal is definitely not going to be much, if at all cheaper than what you currently have (going by the first post). Probably more expensive. But I use them as my datafeed and have no complaints, I don't mind paying for quality. It used to be fairly common (once every couple of weeks) to have an intraday 'hiccup' or data issue, but it's probably been a year since I've seen that.

I moved to NT for charting about 2 years ago, but Esignal is working on a new software version that looks quite promising. I plan to start using it for long-timeframe charting and position trading when it hits beta, and possibly as an intraday replacement for NT.
 
Quote from spup345:

Quick update so far (comments welcome as usual):
-Got an IQFeed trial going and also added Totalview to my IB Datafeed for a month. I'm surprised that IQ Feed doesn't support Totalview, only the less revealing Openview, that could be an IQ Feed dealbreaker for me.

-I eliminated Amibroker, SierraChart, & Multichart from my search since none of them support Market Depth (I was shocked).

-Ninjatrader has yet to work, it freezes every time I try to load a chart, no other platform has given me this problem. So I may just have to cross it off because it doesn't work.

-Still looking at Ensign, Quotetracker, and will probably look at eSignal

I'm starting to learn that most alternatives really just don't have the ease of use, intuitive chart linking, quick interval changing, and customizable Level II/time & sales info that Tradestation has....but I'm still looking eagerly.
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The problem with QT now is that (sadly) Ameritrade has decided to drop Jerry Medved's support and continued development of the platform. Not sure what their plans are for it in the future, but my guess is that Ameritrade feels that their ToS platform is where they want to put their emphasis on. Jerry is AWESOME, but unfortunately he is no longer affiliated with QT as of June 1st.

I loved QT, but just couldn't deal with the horrible "snap-shot" data feed of Ameritrade's "streamer". I substituted that feed with DTN's "IQ-Feed" and it worked pretty well, but sadly DTN is still in the freaking "stone-age" given that they still do not offer Level-2 Nasdaq Total View or the NYSE Book. If you are an equity trader, this is unacceptable! And you will simply be left with pumping a Level-1 "IQ-Feed" thru Quotetracker while still relying on Ameritrade's "streamer" feed for your Level-2 quotes.

Believe it or not, the StreetSmart Pro trading platform from Schwab ( the old CyberTrader platform ) is incredibly fast and offers Level-2, ARCA and INET order routing, decent charting (QT is still much more intuitive with their charting and I still miss it). It's ALL FREE and if you live on the West Coast the trace-routes to their data-servers are extremely FAST with no need to travel clear across the country and deal with the typical Internet congestion.

From what I understand, Schwab is currently working on their own "in-house" trading platform that will be rolled-out at the end of the year. It is currently in Beta testing.

Ameritrade could have hit the ball out of the park by making their data-feed a lot more ROBUST and promoting the use of Quotetracker. Sadly, they have floundered and stumbled and bumbled their way over the last 2 years.... I've yelled and screamed at Ameritrade management ( in the CEO's office ) but they just don't care. They are not pro-active... It takes 6-9 months just for them to make a decision on their data-feed development. I guess for them, ToS is where they believe their real trading platform is.

Check out Schwab's StreetSmart Pro.
You'll be pretty amazed at what it offers, how fast it is, and how FREE it is.

:)
 
2 questions:
1. Does anyone know of a standalone market-depth & Time/sales ONLY app (no charting)?

2. Is Tradestation (and I'm guessing eSignal) the only platforms that show you a historical Time & Sales (with a vertical scrollbar)? All these other platforms basically just show you from the present onwards, but no time & sales from the rest of the day. This is imperative so you can see the details behind the candlesticks on lower volume stocks...

Sidenotes:
A) As for the schwab program, you need a brokerage account with them to use their platform, so that won't work for me.

B) IQ Feed's weak market-depth data basically means I can't use them. I'll need to demo eSignal's data feed because IB's datafeed (with Totalview) doesn't seem to show a lot of market depth either in platforms like Ninjatrader & others as compared to what I see in Tradestation.

C) Maybe 1 day when I have enough cash floating around, I'll deposit $27k into a new Tradestation account and trade 5000 shares per month to get their platform for free ($1200/year waived so it'd be like earning 5% on my money plus any interest they me).

D) Ninjatrader is ok except you can't have "tabs" or multiple workspaces side-by-side, no time & sales history, and from what I can tell, no way to quickly enter & change symbols (you need to go through this whole convoluted instrument manager). Seems like it's more geared towards futures trading and not equities.
 
Well, I'm just about done...

I looked at these charting platforms:
Amibroker, Quotetracker, Investor R/T, Sierrachart, Multicharts, Ninjatrader, Neoticker, Ensign

Used both IQ Feed (w/ LII) and IB's feed (w/ LII) (not many other feeds exist for the retail trader I've learned).

Most of the platforms aren't as polished in look & feel & ease of use as Tradestation is. None of them can do historical Time & Sales (may be a data feed thing, not sure). None seemed to do the auto-scaling of the candlesticks as you shrank/enlarged the timeframe. None of them had a crosshairs function that also showed the data window when you clicked the left-mouse button. I also couldn't find any of them that showed an "average volume" line on the volume portion of a chart. Very few offered any kind of right-click functionality. Alerts based on bid/ask/last were hard to come by. I can go on & on....

But the major limiting factor turns out to be price & data quality.

I can't use IQ Feed because OpenView is no good, I need Totalview. IB's feed WITH Totalview still doesn't seem to show all the levels that Tradestation shows me.

So I really don't have much choice at this point except to demo eSignal because at least that would be $184/month (cheaper than my $229/month for Tradestation). If eSignal measures up to Tradestation, I'll probably switch, otherwise I don't really have any choice but to stay with Tradestation (Realtick is more $$). I guess you ultimately get what you pay for.

If I didn't need market depth, then Neoticker did actually seem closest to Tradestation in functionality, but again, the data feed would be the limiting factor since no one seems to be able to show the type of market depth that Tradestation does. Also, customer support for all these other platforms is usually by email or forum only so any major issues may take time to get resolved as opposed to Tradestation (or the other big platforms).

So, all-in-all, it boils back down to esignal or tradestation.

Thanks for all the suggestions & pointers, hopefully this thread will help others when hunting around.

Sidenote: Money.net seems to have a standalone Totalview market depth & time/sales app for $70/month, but pairing that with the costs of a Level 1 feed & charting platform fees, it's not cost effective, might as well get all-in-one elsewhere.
 
Quote from spup345:

So, all-in-all, it boils back down to esignal or tradestation.
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Hey Spup

A few issues that I have with eSignal ( in each case not a TradeSation issue).

1. eSignal can not presently end the data flow on 60 minute charts at 4:00 EST. The first 30 minutes of after-market data is included (to make the full hour). I cursed this issue again this morning as (due to Intel earnings) my final 60 minute QQQQ bar for July 13 showed a high of almost 46 (45.89) and a close of 45.71 - both not right - High should be 45.5. It can be manually corrected, but first you have to notice it is not right. And presumably every 60 minute semi-conductor chart will also be incorrect. The after market prices also affect most associated indicators on the 60' chart.

Supposedly the next release will fix this (in 2011?)

2. Price alerts can not be set (without triggering) on pre-market prices if the pre-market range is not straddling the close. If the pre-market range is entirely above or below the Close of the previous day, a "pre-market alert" will instantly trigger based on the previous Close. To my knowledge the next release will NOT fix this.

3. It seems T&S (Time and Sales) is important to you - me too. I have never been able to use eSignal's T&S as it always freezes up. Interestingly, using eSignal data to feed the T&S in Quotetracker does not lock up. So I think eSignal data is ok / fast enough, but its my eSignal charting software that freezes up fairly regularly. Finally the new release of eSignal will use multi-thread design (after its been out for what - 6 years?) so hopefully the freeze-ups become a non issue. I do run 5 monitors of charts (on an i7 quad core computer with 6GB of memory) - should that be too much for eSignal?

4. eSignal has no Radarscreen like TradeStation, and no near term plans for it.

The above is a heads-up as you evaluate eSignal. These issues may or may not matter to you. Hope this helps.
 
TS 8.8 is a big improvement over earlier versions. The EL editor has it's own development environment now and not just the archaic text editor as before. Also, TS now allows you to upload and install individual updates and not have to waste time reloading the entire software package as the earlier ancient versions forced you to do. And, the two most important things to me: 1) when you try to load a chart window with 7 months of data and only 6 months is available, it will now just load the 6 months instead of like in the past where it wouldn't load anything and give an error saying data out of range like windows 3.1 or something 2) it gives the full guaranteed 6 months of tick data without occasional gaps in the data as in the prehistoric versions of TS.

I'm still checking out 8.8, but so far it is an improvement.
 
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