[waveslider]

Thursday's order entry debacle sealed it for me.

tradestation used to be the standard for tech. analysis along with esignal, metastock. In the past years it has been passed up by better products.

I am now looking for a new solution.

Neoticker has always attracted me, and I think that using the MB account is what I will likely do.

I know about ninja trader and it seems good also.

Important to me is speed of execution/data quality. I don't need a lot of bells/whistles, but a decent programming language is helpful.

I am looking for a broker to work with also, someone who would soft dollar the software (I do a lot of business), and provide competitive commissions. Also the broker has to handle securities, or the software should handle multiple brokers.

Any help/suggestions are welcome, thanks in advance.

[brownsfan019]

Wave - demo Open ECrys platform too. I know they will provide a competitive quote. If you need further contacts, feel free to PM me and I will do my best to help out.

[thrunner]

TS as a broker is pretty useless, but their charting and datafeed is still useful to me, so I am keeping a minimal TS account and doing 10 trades/month.
The most painless transition away from TS as a broker is probably to go Multicharts and IB. MC is >95% compatible with TS ESL and will support more brokers in the future : http://forum.tssupport.com/viewtopic.php?t=5419

We have finished working on fxcm as a supported broker. Our engineers have almost completed developing Zen Fire and are in the process of developing Pats. Trading Technologies is next in the line.

[bh_trade]

I have often defended TS in the past but I am done with that. Their brokerage incompetence seems to grow with each passing quarter. I still like their charting, but the warts on the brokerage side are making me seriously consider a switch to Multicharts as well.

Originally Posted by thrunner »

TS as a broker is pretty useless, but their charting and datafeed is still useful to me, so I am keeping a minimal TS account and doing 10 trades/month.
The most painless transition away from TS as a broker is probably to go Multicharts and IB. MC is >95% compatible with TS ESL and will support more brokers in the future : http://forum.tssupport.com/viewtopic.php?t=5419

[waveslider]

Does multicharts support any other broker besides IB? I hear their data feed is sub-par.
Other than that it looks good.
bh - agree, done defending TS

[sevensa]

Originally Posted by bh_trade »

I have often defended TS in the past but I am done with that. Their brokerage incompetence seems to grow with each passing quarter. I still like their charting, but the warts on the brokerage side are making me seriously consider a switch to Multicharts as well.

But MC is just a charting platform. What advantage will this give you over TS if you still like the charting, but not TS brokerage? If you switch to MC, you will still need a broker and you don't get a better charting platform.

I have been using MC for the last 3+ years and has pretty much given up on them. Don't be fooled by all the features listed on their website. Many of them are very buggy. They implement features just for the sake of listing it on their website, but don't necessarily care to fix the bugs. They used to be very good in the beginning, but lately it seems they implement a feature, list it on their website and move on to the next feature without caring to fix the bugs first before implementing a new one. When pointing out the bugs, they just provide the vague response that it will be fixed/implemented in one of the future versions. Some issues have not been fixed yet for literally years. I suspect this is because they started off on the wrong path and to fix something will require massive rework, so they just ignore it.

The software is also very unstable. It crashes frequently and sometimes takes forever to start. It seems to be more stable if you have lots of memory and fast CPU, but forget about running it on the their minimum requirements. I can understand software being slow if you don't have lots of resources, but it is a sign of buggy software if it just crashes on less resources.

I think a big problem is that none of the MC staff actually trades so they don't understand what is really important. For example, they don't have a Trade Manager. If you trade longer term, you have to keep track of trades manually, change your system to write the next day's orders to a file, or look in the log files per their "solution". They don't think a Trade Manager is important even though they said it will be implemented in one of the future versions, which could be anything from 2 months to 3 years.

All in all, I don't think MC is any better than any entry level charting program out there and certainly is no better than TS with that regard. The advantage is that it does integrate with IB and other brokers like OEC for a datafeed and this is why I got it in the beginning. Back then the lifetime lisence was around $200 and with the pretty much free IB feed, you couldn't beat it for price.

[sevensa]

Originally Posted by waveslider »

Does multicharts support any other broker besides IB? I hear their data feed is sub-par.
Other than that it looks good.
bh - agree, done defending TS

Scroll down to the bottom of the page to see their supported datafeeds.

http://www.tssupport.com/multicharts/datamanagement/

For a broker, they only support IB. They do claim to have an API available which you can use to connect to any broker. The price for this API is $5K.

[waveslider]

Anyone use neoticker? Its expensive, but has been around for years and seems to be outpacing the rest.