Questions for Tradestation users

I trade on both IB and TS.

TS is rock solid and not slow at all.

I autotrade > 800 symbols in Radar Screen (no charts).

My complaints for TS are:
* $.01/share adds up fast if you are active and eats too much of the profits.
* TS does not provide ways to segment order traffic by strategy
* There is no way to get order status in EL
* TS is very slow to address bugs.

On the other hand:
* IB is much cheaper
* The executions are very similar, but IB may have a slight edge.
* IB needs a LOT more code to automate.
* IB needs a 3rd party data feed to trade a lot of symbols
* IB charts are clunky
* IB order managment is clunky

I run both on the same i7 system and have no trouble with CPU loading.
 
Please correct me if I am wrong, but I understand EasyLanguage to be an interpreted language. That being the case, instructions can never be executed as quickly as (efficiently written) compiled code (C/C++ or whatever). For any strategy that is trading faster than a few seconds this would probably impact your results. That is, it's not necessarily the broker communication or the fills that are too slow - it could just be the decision process (interpreted code) running on your PC.

BTW, I totally agree about competing with GS or other high speed traders. They are actually co-locating into the exchange itself - that is insane. There are plenty of opportunities for small fries that don't appeal to the big players - that's where I plan to graze.

Good luck,

Damien
 
On modern CPU's, as long as you arnt doing anything with loops, you can approximate the per tick processing time as zero, at least as compared to the time needed to get the quote, and send the order.

For execution, TS is fine, as long as you dont mind paying way too much in comish and you dont need a low latency solution.

If you need low latency, then go with a broker that offers colo and code it in C/C++.

Backtesting is different. TS easy lang is way, way, way too slow to be a good backtest platform.
 
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