Most other platforms will be better at keeping up with live data. The ToS platform is wonderful in having many bells and whistles and has unusually wide coverage of equities, futures, options and forex. It has excellent options analysis capabilities. Its price is built into TD Ameritrade's fee structure. It also has good market scanning and notification features and technical analysis tools. It has some capability for writing your own scripts, plus a few other very nice features such as the ability to replay more recent historical data. It's simulator's order fill algorithm is horrible however. It fills limit buy orders on the bid and sell orders on the ask, something that will seldom happen in live trading using a typical broker. Because your orders are held on the ToS servers until they are executable you are virtually guaranteed a place near the end of the order queue --not where you would prefer to have your order positioned. Of course the advantage to new traders of having their orders held on their brokers server is that they can change their minds endlessly without annoying anyone or causing cancellation fees, and too, their orders won't show on the exchanges depth of market displays of resting orders. ToS's accounting software that keeps track of profits, losses and commissions, is not as well developed as on other platforms, and occasionally mishandles unusual events such as mergers, etc. Their software is bloated and slow compared to other platforms -- is it still mostly Java?, so while it is nice for investors, it is not for short-time-frame traders. It lags horribly in fast markets. Its plotting while both extensive and picturesque also lag horribly at times. So while the ToS platform is an excellent one-size-fits-many platform it is not a one-size-fits-all platform. It is excellent for investors and swing traders but it is not for day traders or anyone attempting to scalp, and I wouldn't think it would be good for automated, algorithmic trading either.
