Iâm no expert but I have used a few different platforms and here is my take. The best DAT platforms are easy to ascertain because they were bought out for big dollars. If you want to know which platforms are or at least were the bestâ¦.follow the money. Who bought what? Lets see: Instinet bought Protrader i.e. gr8trade. Schwab bought Cybertrader, and Ameritrade bought Tradecast. Those 3 along with Realtick are what I would consider the best 4 mainstream platforms.
(Realtick and TerraNova go way back Iâm not sure of the exact relationship there) If you wanted to add a fifth to the list, the traders that scalp NASDAQ using watcher swear by the damn thing.
I have used all those above except watcher. At any rate all of those are vastly superior to superior to the junk that some firms use. But donât take my word for it, the firms that bought the best platforms obviously spent money researching what they were buying. Of course you can make the argument that Schwab for example wanted cybertrader for the hyperactive daytraders (volume) they have as well but that only holds to a certain extent IMO. If you look at instinetâs more recent purchase of Protrader they almost immediately sacked half of the branches so it seems apparent to me that getting the platform was a large reason for the purchase.
I have commented before on my experience using redi+ which I railed on in several posts weeks ago simply because I had the unfortunate experience of using it and am still blown away that so many traders still use it. However, understanding now how many large prop traders trade (large size, few positions, tape reading, etc.) redi+ does indeed work fine for them.
The fact is however the platforms that most retail users trade on remain superior to what most prop firms are using in multiple ways which I and others have commented on before. This is certainly a paradox because you have guys with 30K dollar Ameritrade accounts with better technology than guys with 100K dollar accounts at prop firms, but it is explainable if you understand that most prop firms want to do it themselves or sub it out so they can save money.
Does anyone think Bright for example would ever use Realtick and pay them a licensing fee or whatever when they get redi+ for free? Not likely. Also as far as I can tell most prop firms are trading 80% or more NYSE stocks. In my experience those traders are trading bigger size and fewer positions where as many retail traders or nasdaq traders do the opposite, i.e. they trade more positions and smaller size. Therefore the innovation with regard to platforms on the prop side has lagged the development of the platforms that are geared more toward the retail trader.
With regard to gr8trade in particular, it is a very good execution platform. There was some discussion a while back about the original guys who developed it leaving (this was over a year ago) and it does seem like the platform has not innovated much lately but I have not used it in a while. (Perhaps someone that does use it can answer whether you can you do chart overlays, or spread charts with it? I donât know? As far back as two years ago I talked with the programmers and gave them a list of things I would have liked to see numero uno being, I need to be able to overlay symbols on top of futures charts.). The said it was being worked on. Also there was some discussion that gr8trade when it came out looked an awful lot like tradecast? But hey everyone steals from everyone right Trent?
(Mikey). Obsecure movie reference there. ;-)
With regard to Protrader, I donât see how they could possibly compete with firms like Echo, Bright, Andover, etc for high volume traders. When Andover opened an office next to the Protrader I used to trade at we immediately lost our best 2-3 traders to them because there rates crushed PTâs.
I think a good general rule for most traders is this. If you are the type of trader that trades only a few positions at a time often the same stocks day in and day out, pretty much anything will work. Also you can supplement a sorry platform with something like First Alert which is what Bright and other firms do. However if you like to trade multiple positions and you need your platform to alert you to new ideas or use things like server side stops, alerts, the use of charts and various technical indicators, etc the choice of platforms becomes more and more important.
The connectivity issues with Protrader are debatable. Originally there was a question of how some of the data was coded. I canât remember the specifics but it had to do with how the server interpreted data if it used the direct feed from the exchange instead of Comstock (it had to be re-coded like Comstock or hyperfeed data or somethingâ¦sorry I canât remember). If someone post on the connectivity issue ask them if they are trading at home or from an office and ask them which data feed they use. I rarely had problems scalping with their platform. The platform does use a ton of resourcesâ¦..but I like that. I mean so whatâ¦.computers are dirt freaking cheap people.
