[Dogpile]

<<otherwise I would use IB>>

if you only trade futures and stocks and not options -- what is the advantage of IB over TS? I very rarely have problems with filling order at the bid/ask price for futures. IB clearly has something special in options with their Timber Hill subsidiary -- but what do you get at IB for futures that you don't get with TS?

I have used Tradestation for years and would recommend it highly as it is a truly amazing piece of software for active traders. I was on the professional buyside at a firm with a $10 million annual IT budget and we used institutional grade software including ILX/Bridge/Bloomberg/Factset/Advent -- and Tradestation has more useful functionality than all of those --- though I do wish they could do something with Factset to integrate that.

One thing I don't like is that you cannot trade european futures on TS -- though you can get the data feeds through Eurex.