Quote from cosmic:
I agree to most of the concerns & had my fair share of troubles with them also. But as others have pointed out, I have liked their platform very much & was there almost since the beginning. I am using now a very good alternative, that will overpower TS easily within the next year.
http://www.tssupport.com/products/multicharts/
One time purchase, good range of datafeeds & great responsive support. Take a look for yourself....
nice sunday,
cosmic
P.S: You can even import any TS related study into MultiCharts without having to change the code to make it work there...
I guess I'll add my own 2 cents here. I was with TS for about 5 months. Really I got their brokerage acct because I wasn't going to pay $250 for their platform by itself. With the acct, it's free with 10 RT trades/month or $99 a month otherwise.
I wanted to test out KwikPop and a few other indicators that were TS-based. Anyway, the problem with TS started with opening the acct. It took about 2 weeks. At first, they needed more documents for address verification, then I was told by Ray (the sales rep) that the acct could not be opened until the verification dept approved it. Then a week later, I got an e-mail saying the acct was opened, which surprised Ray when I called in to confirm.
The forex acct is almost like pulling teeth to open. But about 2 months down the road, I switched to a futures acct and had much less problems opening.
But overall I had problems with the platform. Sometimes the datafeed would stop or entire charts would open up missing. I'd have to shut down TS and restart to get everything working. Now I'll admit that my computer could have been part of the problem, as I meant to do a fresh install of WinXP sp2, but I didn't at the time. But the problems with both the platform and customer service and the $99/month (I didn't end up trading much) was enough
Oh, and their daytrading margins. Only on the mini indexes and only between 930 and 4pm or something restrictive like that. And their market selection wasn't great, either. This is supposed to be a brokerage that prides itself in being the leader in direct access and backtesting fully automated strategies. (That's their main selling point: that you can just create a system based on rules with little programming knowledge, backtest it, forward test it, and then set it on autopilot)
You need programming knowledge no matter what they say. And a bunch of 3rd party supporters are more than welcome to take your money to program these solutions for you.
Most brokerages allow day margins anytime 24 hours, but you must be out of the market before the close of the day session. Then reenter after the reopening.
My teacher (of a trading system) advised me to go with
www.Infinityfutures.com , which I did. Free real-time data and historical fill for only $24/mo with charting platform
www.SierraChart.com . TransactAT platform isn't half bad. I also ended up going with
www.OpenEcry.com and use them mostly.
On the tradestation forum, there are a lot of complaints even by the veteran users that a lot of the promises made by TS (forex integration to TS platform, multiple data feeds, int'l market datafeeds, trading on the chart, different chart styles like renko, 3 line break, etc) have been "in the works" for quite a long time i.e. YEARS. Even their forum is very unorganized.
It seems like TS doesn't care or doesn't focus their attention on the basics. They advertise all their awards, but the company's internal structure seems to only be about the dollar. They are extremely quick/eagar about signing you up, then you are just a number at that point.
I agree with the quote above, MultiCharts looks very promising. I bought their permanent license. they just raised it to $800 from $400 and it was even less than that when they first started. They still have a few things to work out, but I think within 6-12 months it will be fully polished. It will easily sell for $2000+
I also agree with some of the posters who say they just do their 10 trades a month just to keep the platform for testing and TS-specific trades. A lot of TS users who like the charting seem to do this. after their first 10 trades, they switch back to their main broker.
So to sum it up, unless you need TS for indicators or for testing, have another main direct access broker that is easy to deal with.
