There are a bunch out there now. Every Big Prime broker seems to be coming out with their own platform. I looked around a lot and actually tried ITG's Quantex before switching to Goldman's Tradefactory. Flextrader is supposed to be awesome too, but here is what I've found......the hard way!
First of all, you pretty much have to be running institutional size money to use any of these products. They all work through prime broker relationships, so you must have a prime brokerage account. The legal minimum (Federal Law) is 500K for a Prime brokerage account, but most Prime's want 2M to 5M minimum. Also, you will be required to instal dual redundant T-1 connections for most products. If you meet those requirements there are lots of options for you.
Flextrader is 12.5K/month minimum, just for technology fee's and you get a very robust shell or, basically an API. If you want to trade then you have to establish relationships with everyone you do business with. So you you have to open personal accounts directly with ISLD, INCA, etc. Also, you have to be a bad ass unix/java programmer. Basically, this product was designed for stat arbs working at specialist/MM firms where they have a staff to support it and existing relationships with other MM's, ECN's, and exchanges.
Quantex is great. They will program your strategies for you and pay for your T-1's, so the overhead is low, or at least it seems low until you start paying ticket charges on thousands of tickets a month. Their fee's are a bit stiff and if you want to compete with IB type fee's you have to be doing > 10M shares a month. Also, every trade you make with them has to be cleared through your prime broker which typically will charge you $8 a trade for for 5K trades per month (you do the math).
So that leave Tradefactory. I have become a happy customer of the Goldman Family. If you open a Prime at SLK, you get to use their REDI+ product with no ticket charges and very competitive rates. Tradefactory trades are booked on the REDI trade blotter and daily P&L reports automatically for you accounting convenience (also no ticket charges). You can automate trading of any equity and e-mini's as well.
It runs as a thin client on a win2k front end with a java API for automation. The product was designed for professional stat/index arbs. You can submit hunderds of orders per second. If I submit 100 market orders on a basket of NASDAQ stocks I am 100% filled and reported to my screen in about 1 second. Literally, instantaneous! The same order of NYSE stocks is filled probably instantly, but reported to my screen 95% filled in <5 seconds. There are always a couple of stragglers that take 30 seconds to get the fill reported to my screen (specialists...ugh). Still, it is the fastest DOT box I've used. It is designed to be so reliable and solid that you can run it automated. You can pull data from a nice set of proprietary analytics. I've had zero downtime with REDI+ and Tradefactory.
This is not even in the same ballpark as Tradestation or any other retail front end. I started out swing trading on a web browser based product and have gradually moved up over the years to these products. Over time, I have tested and traded pretty much every retail product out there. IMHO there is nothing out there better than the products offered by SLK.
