Tradestation

[TL Staff 10]

Plantation | Florida | 33324

Address : TradeStation Building 8050 SW 10th Street, Suite 2000 Plantation, FL 33324

Contact Phone : (800) 808-9336

[Soultrader 12]

Hard to complain with its superior charting platform. Tradestation does offer top of the industry charting software with the ability to add custom studies and indicators. However datafeed is unreliable at times and execution is slow. Overall a good brokerage firm.

[mckinneyseller 10]

Execution speed: sometimes you don't get filled. Many times you see significant slippage even with limit orders. If you trade odd lots, you will have more of a problem. I used TerraNova TradientPro before Tradestation and their execution for odd lots was much better than TradeStation.

 

Datafeed: You can get disconnected but the software does automatically reconnect. Sometimes the datafeed will get out-of-sync between the price you see on the level 2 time and sales window and the price you see on the candlestick chart.

 

Commission and fees: low cost if you trade enough shares to waive the platform fee of $100/month.

 

Client support: it'll take 24 hours to get a response to an email but the response usually does answer your question. Phone support isn't very good. The forums are not searchable unless you are running IE under Windows. In fact much of their website is unusable unless you login using IE under Windows. It'd be a much better product if their forums were more usable. Even when the search does work, you can't finetune so that it finds what you really want.

 

Overall: Its charting is very good. I used ThinkOrSwim and it frustrated me because its windows used too much screen real estate so you were very limited in how much you can put on your desktop. With Tradestation, you can use multiple monitors. You can also set up multiple workspaces. The workspaces are simply additional tabs on the desktop. Click the tab and you switch over to a different set of charts. That is great if you like to track lots of stocks and/or multiple timeframes.

 

If something better came along, I'd probably switch. But for now, I'm satisfied.

[MadMarketScientist 11]

I personally am not trading with Tradestation Securities so my review is strictly on a platform basis -- charting and data.

 

Having used Tradestation since it was TS 2000 and actually Super Charts before that I feel I've been with them through everything. When I first got data it came over my cable line -- no, not through a cable modem but literally a box that you installed that would enable it to get a datafeed without anything to do with the internet.

 

Of course this was inconsistent and most nights you had to download a complete dataset since you missed so much.

 

Then came (finally) the internet feed and TS 8. I can say that I've used almost every platform out there and couldn't see changing. I have uptime close to 100% - sure, it's not perfect but years ago I used to have to carry around a key to put on my system so remebering the old days certainly makes me appreciate what we have now. The charting is superior, there are numberous indicators and customization is more than possible.

 

If there was a downside I'd say if you don't trade with Tradestation they hit you pretty hard on the platform fee. And, it would be nice if the number of markets would be expanded - appreciate the Eurex (some) being added but if you want a real international lineup you won't get it here.

 

I like the new additions as well such as Range/Momentum bars and it's about time on that.

 

Overall, given I could use anything, I still find Tradestation is an ideal solution for me.

[Tradewinds 12]

I do a lot of programing, and I've found EasyLanguage to be very good for what I need. I transfered to Tradestation from another broker, and had to learn how the charting worked, but have been able to duplicate everything that I need. The data options that TradeStation has compared to my other broker are better, and it looks like the data is coming though more often.

 

The strategy testing in Tradestation is far superior to my last broker. So the charts are very good, the programing language is very good, and I like the data options. The Matrix trading ladder is good. The commision fees and the margin requirements are also better than my last broker. So I prefer TradeStation by quite a large margin compared to my last broker.