New Day Trader looking for best Platform...

[murray t turtle]

Ok, here's a suggestion. Why not focus on what you do well (swing trading where you were making money) rather then day trading, where you were losing money? I have dabbled at day trading and frankly I suck at it. I had considered trying to spend more time to try to improve my results but I am doing well with swing trading so for now I've decided I'd rather leverage my strengths than my weakness.

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Good word.
IB is very good [+ they recommend you have 2 brokers ,cause they dont have time to answer the phone]Sure,E hitman, you can do better than E-trade; i remember they charged my account for using their toll free telephone stock quotes.

Mainly print/record your own charts, that way when you get bad price volume data [+ you will, not a prediction, simply life]. you dont have to close out a swing position trade for bad data.My e signal intraday charts went down one time; but e signal 20 day charts + bid/ ask worked well

 

[777]

My recommendation to any new daytraders is to trade high dollar stocks ($75+/share) because then you buy/sell only 100 or 200 shares at a time. At $1 per trade, at least you can keep trading costs minimal.

Think or Swim is VERY expensive. Their minimum fee per stock trade is $5.00. Believe me, those can add up real quickly. Each position (to get in and out of a trade) will cost $10 with Think or Swim and only $2 with IB. Options and futures are also much less expensive with IB.

But IB's Java based platform is horrible and a resource hog. I don't know of any daytraders who don't use a separate API with IB. Some are even free, like Ninja Trader. But they're not very elaborate platforms and leave a lot to be desired.

If you trade more than 5,000 shares a month, Tradestation has a very nice platform, but there are downfalls that I discussed in my video.

Maybe others can chime in and give feedback on other brokers and platforms that may suit your needs better.

Good luck.

Trading high priced stocks is often not so easy because of the spread, especially for beginners.

 

[MotiveWave]

Its still in beta but I suggest Interactive Brokers and motivewave.

Definitely not in beta anymore. We're a full blown professional trading platform. MotiveWave (www.MotiveWave.com) is a really good front end choice with IB if you don't want to use IB TWS. You can use a supplementary data feed like IQFeed to fill in the historical data, since IB's third party API limits the amount of data to 1 year of historical data.

 

[MotiveWave]

From what I've seen (and I haven't seen them all), NT is the best you're gonna get for free. And it does provide live streaming quotes when you interface it with IB. But is it a great platform? Heck no! Lots of issues where it just wasn't robust enough for me. I certainly wouldn't pay their asking price to do live trading off it, but hey, I can't knock it since it's free without the trading buttons on the chart.

I'm trying MotiveWave right now. First, be very careful of getting used to software where prices haven't been determined yet. You don't want to get hooked and then reeled in. My first impressions of MotiveWave is "amateur hour". Far from being very configurable. The only thing I like about it is that you can open more than one workspace and assign it to a monitor in multi-monitor mode. But the buck stops there. Heck, I couldn't even find pivot points in their studies. And I'm not waking up an hour early every morning to calculate my own pivots and plot them on all my charts! ;-)

The more I check out various platforms, the more I understand why I pay so much for e-signal!

I'd be interested to get your feedback on what you think of us now. We were in beta for a year to get user feedback, so it was free during that time. Now years later, we are a very evolved platform and highly configurable. And we do have Pivot Points All pricing is on our website.

 

[JSOP]

I'd be interested to get your feedback on what you think of us now. We were in beta for a year to get user feedback, so it was free during that time. Now years later, we are a very evolved platform and highly configurable. And we do have Pivot Points All pricing is on our website.

Do you allow for programming strategies by traders themselves or do you just provide a collection of existing strategies? And what about programming for indicators?

Thanks

 

[MotiveWave]

You have a dilemma my friend. The problem is that the best platform does not reside with the best broker. Interactive Brokers have the best rates for trading and nobody comes near them in terms of interest charged on margin accounts. But they don't offer much by way of technical analysis, back testing and/or strategy optimization.

You can use third party software with IB but good software will run from $300 to a couple of thousand a month.

Our software is very reasonably priced and connects to IB. Lifetime Licenses with trading functionality cost between $295 and $1595 depending on the level of features you want. Our Strategy Edition is our lowest edition that has full back testing and optimization for $595 (Lifetime License).

 

[MotiveWave]

Do you allow for programming strategies by traders themselves or do you just provide a collection of existing strategies? And what about programming for indicators?

Thanks

Yes. We've got a free Java SDK for programming your own custom studies/indicators/strategies. We have 275+ built-in studies and 30+ built in strategies too. If you can't program in Java yourself, we can put you in contact with a programmer who knows MotiveWave well and can give you a quote.

 

[meanstreets]

it's because professionals who make a living 'trading' trade futures and 100 share lots like in daytrading and short term trading.

paying $10/trade for stocks intraday is not 'professional' but amateur and fool.

here is a tip. if you don't make consistent profits within first 5 days of trading, stop trading NOW! obviously you have no system or trading plan.

and find a better system or buy one or copy one.

all brokers are the same for short term trading and daytrading it's charged by the shares...from .005/share to .01 share.

and futures it's like $1-$3 per round trip.

daytrading isn't like a regular business where it takes years to 'build a business' etc it's like a video game, you make money on day one.

Hi,

I have been swing trading for about a year now through Etrade and have been doing a lot of research. I want to be able to day trade more now, which I tried my hand at the past couple months and hasn't gone so well. I broke even for the year after being up prior to day trading.

Etrade is definitely not a good platform for an active day trader at $9.99 per stock trade. I usually only trade equities and would trade about3- 5 positions a day if day trading. And I have about $25K to play with.

I'm looking for a broker with a good platform, low commissions, good charting, research and T/A options. I want to be able to have about half my position in long/ swing trades and the other half day trading.

I have been looking into interactive brokers, think or swim, light speed and trade station. It seems most people here use IB in one for form or another.

Any suggestions would be highly appreciated.

 

[JSOP]

Yes. We've got a free Java SDK for programming your own custom studies/indicators/strategies. We have 275+ built-in studies and 30+ built in strategies too. If you can't program in Java yourself, we can put you in contact with a programmer who knows MotiveWave well and can give you a quote.

If you don't offer programming in any other language other than Java, then I'm gonna have to pass. Not interested in spending extra for a programmer on top of software fee I still have to pay to you. Let me know if you are able to offer programming in languages other than Java.

Good luck!

 

[MotiveWave]

Currently, the only option is to program in Java. It is on our list of future enhancements to add another programming language but we do not have a timeline for this yet (or a decision on what programming language we will add).