[sevensa]

Originally Posted by Mavrik00 »

hey guys,

No, im not affiliated with them, just a client that found them to be a great solution to my needs as a trader.

The problems I had with IB were...

1. Account Paperwork was extremely difficult and not user friendly at all

I did everything online and was a breeze.

2. They were so large that customer service felt like calling tradestation at 930am EST

I never had to call them in the couple of years I have been using them.

3. To trade futures you had to log into their data manager, and then log into Ninja or any other platform

If you want to use another trading platform yes. You don't HAVE to and IB has a fairly decent booktrader.

4. Margins were higher

I am not sure if this is really a bad thing.

5. They charged for Data Feed

If you do less than $30 in commissions in a month, then they charge $10, otherwise it is free. You don't have to be a very active trader to get to $30 a month in commissions. They also provide backfills for their data. Zen-Fire/Mirus doesn't.

6. They lost my wire 3 times, took me 2 weeks to find it, only to have it returned, again, customer service was too "big company" and it really felt like i was getting nowhere.

I can't speak to that. Never happened to me.

Ultimately, if you want to trade everything under the sun, than i guess i can see value in IB's ability to cover all the bases, but man...who needs that much flexibility in this difficult world of trading?

You don't need to want to trade everything under the sun. Maybe just Euro Stoxx, Kospi and ES/YM/NQ. Why wouldn't you want the flexibility to trade different uncorrelated international markets?

Now with Mirus, i was greeted with a great guy named Sean who got me set up quickly, set me up with Zen Fire Data which is FREE, and is AWESOME for Futures Data for most any day traders needs.

What do you do when you miss a few days and need backfill data?

[diablo272]

Originally Posted by sevensa »

What do you do when you miss a few days and need backfill data?

Unless you're trading a VERY fast timeframe such as 1 second, you should be able to backfill your charts for at least a few days' tick data with Ninja/Zen.

[BlowFish]

7. IB offers a Java API. Ninja does not, therefore it does not satisfy the OP's single main requirement. Incidentally I use both.

[dransfield]

Hi,

I use Zenfire that has backdata of at least 2 weeks, but the bad thing with zenfire is that it provides not daily bars so if you use pivots they may not be in synch with other data feeds

[BlowFish]

Zenfire does not provide historical data. Ninjatrader LLC does supply historical data from their own servers for use with NT charts. This might be what you are thinking of.

[jimbo320]

Originally Posted by sevensa »

And I have sent an e-mail inquiry once to Mirus and never heard back from them. On the other hand, never had any issues with IB. I am not sure how you can recommend Mirus to everyone without knowing the markets they want to trade. The markets available through Mirus is very limited compared to IB.

If one's criteria is to use brokers no one had issues with before, then you can stop looking and save yourself the time.

I would second that IB is a good broker to learn to trade with, they have access to just about everything you could possibly want to trade through the universal account.

If you know exactly what you want to trade already you can pick brokers that offer what you want.

[EsotericRule]

I would warn everyone away from ninja/zen data. its completely unreliable. last week alone on the ES, one 2 hour and 40 minute data gap and several smaller multi minute gaps. Inexcusable given todays technology and the low investment needed to provide triple redundancy on servers. Only one 'provider' I've found that is worse, and thats ES data on TOS (owned by TD Bank).

DTN is affordable, their data clean, and it won't cost you an arm and a leg like esignal.