Quote from lescor:
Sounds like someone who hasn't used THE HAMMER!!!
You're right, haven't used it. Went to a pretty cool looking office in Chicago called Spike (an Andover sub-group or something) and watched guys trade on it, looked like a Watcher type clone when I saw it (this was two years ago at least, I'm sure it must have improved since then). At the time they offered guys a choice of Hammer and Redi Plus, and I saw a lot more Redi Plus logins than Hammer ones when I was there (I'm sure Don will get some mileage out of that comment

), maybe someone can clarify the true stats that knows that office.
Sat with some guys there who were trading on it for half a day, from what they told me the Nasdaq scalpers loved it, anyone trading a lot of stocks at a time that I talked to was frustrated with it. At the time it didn't have charts and most of what you had to do with it was keystroke driven, a lot of guys said it took them a month or two to really get good at entering and replacing orders on it (which is what also brings up the Watcher comparison). Is this still the case? (Put your promo here, a long time has passed since I saw it and I'd like to know actually).
I know there are a lot of Andover recruiters here, and I don't want to get flamed for making a derogatory comment about it, so in all fairness some of the Nasdaq scalpers I talked to there who were past the keystroke learning curve liked it. That just isn't the way I trade so it wouldn't have worked for me.
One of the guys trading there also was complaining that at the time they were not letting him do conversions, they would make him buy bullets everyday instead. He liked to trade the same stocks everyday and eventually left. I have always wondered if that is a policy there or if maybe he just didn't have enough funds in his account or what the deal with that was, if you can I would appreciate if you can tell me if they do in fact allow conversions and/or options trades there or not? Maybe it was just Spike and not Andover? Don't know. I have always wondered and never asked since, if you know the answer I'd like to know.
Quote from lescor:
And now you can add Echopoint to the list of nickel and dime charges that they'll hit you for.
In all fairness, why shouldn't they? It's not the trading software, which is free (for me at least), it's an optional piece that they developed that gives real-time stock entry points. I've never used it so I can't comment on how good it is, stuff like that never does much for me, but I think it's pretty good that they are offering things like that to their traders and if some guy wants to elect to pay $95 or whatever it is to get an additional piece of software that helps him trade then good for him. I think the bottom line is, other firms aren't doing it even for free. If other firms were doing it and giving it away, well than that is different. But no one else even has this kind of stuff that I know of except for Pristine trading and they also charge for it. I say Kudos for Echo for allocating resources to develop more tools in a cruddy market.