HOWTO Setup a daytrading trader-station

Dear forum - Members
Subject:HOWTO Setup a daytrading trader-station

I am new in day trading and face difficulties in selecting the apropriate services and software. Would appreciate any help in doing so.


1) Although I am aware of most of the underlying economics up to derivatives' pricing levels, I am completely unaware of the best value for money software and services that I need to be able to practically trade on NASDAQ and NYSE

2) I am not situated in the US and am therefore excluded by some of the famous discount brokers (ie Scottrade).

3) I am looking for a "one stop shop" where I can obtain real-time data, and be able to place market orders (long/short) with reasonable pricing. I will also need proper charting ie candlestick charts (red/green) on various time frames. Further on, I would like to have basic research facilities ie: stocks that have opened on significant distance from previous closing. Finally, fast clearing and proper margins should be made available too.

4) Traded instruments are mostly Stocks and secondly options

Now the obvious question is:

WHICH is the best solution (best valuer for money) and easier to go life with? I am trying to avoid to subscribe to ten different companies to get a mosaic of software and service to do the job.

After some research I have seen that the following software does not seem to fit to my requirements.

1) Lightspeed
2) SaxoTrading
3) MBT NAvigator
4) ...other...

I would like to capitalize on your experience and ask you all what would be your suggestion??

Ixanos

Have you considered Tradestation?

Tradestation is not a one-stop shop if I am not mistaken.
I would need a broker and a data feed. Or am I wrong?
Further on, I think it is very expensive. Or not?

ixanos said:

Tradestation is not a one-stop shop if I am not mistaken.
I would need a broker and a data feed. Or am I wrong?
Further on, I think it is very expensive. Or not?

Click to expand...

Tradestation provides brokerage services, data feed, trading platform with decent graphics and a very comprehensive programming language (should you need it). It is free if you trade a certan number of shares or contracts per month.

However for a "one-stop" shop you should look at Interactive Brokers (IB for short). Although their charting is not so brilliant, they have a comprehensive trading platform, where you can trading many different instruments from the same account and platform. Youl hold an account in a designated base currency and can trade in any other currency for equities, options etc.

Their main base is the US, but they also have an office in the UK (don't know about the Netherlands). If you look at both sites you will probably find demo software or archived webinars that will give you further information.

Charlton

try thinkorswim Home - Stock Option Investing - Stock Option Trading - Online Trading Stocks and Options

If you register, you can download an up to date version of the Desktop software - no expiry - and play to your hearts content.

US stocks and options, with some futures and futures options too.

Comes with real time L2 prices, two charting packages (TOS charts is their own and you get Prophet charts built in), stock scanners (and spread scanners for option strategies), basic signal generator, all the indicators you should ever need.

Added to that you can trade all US stocks, some futures, forex, and US Equity + (some) futures options, sounds exactly what you're after. They have just added a DOM to their package but it's still in it's infancy.

If you're looking to trade some options, this is the sh!t for retail traders. Have a go with the Analyze functionality; don't know about an API or DDE/ RTD whatever for excel... I have heard of one being available though. For some reason, they don't seem to get mentioned alot on T2W...

(no, I don't work for them, blah blah blah).

Suggest you check it out, the platform is awesome. Oh, and it's free, forever, even the demo version.

I have already tested thinkorswim. What i did not like on this software (and perhaps I havent sert it up appropriately), is that I cannot see the actual price of the selected stock directly next to the chart (right -side) and also that it doe not refresh faster than 1 time per minute! Furether on, and this is the most vital : I did not manage to specify an order (buy or sell) accompanied by a dierect stop loss or limit for safety. Somehow this seemed to be complicated.

I just downloaded the software from Interactive Brokers and will try it once I somehow have managed to obtain login/pwd for the demo

Hi Carlton

Tradestation seems to be a nice application and the fact that they provide an API is perfect as I could develope my own stuff. But on their web site i did not manage to find a demo! Is there one I can download and test the software???

ixanos said:

I have already tested thinkorswim. What i did not like on this software (and perhaps I havent sert it up appropriately), is that I cannot see the actual price of the selected stock directly next to the chart (right -side) and also that it doe not refresh faster than 1 time per minute! Furether on, and this is the most vital : I did not manage to specify an order (buy or sell) accompanied by a dierect stop loss or limit for safety. Somehow this seemed to be complicated.

Click to expand...

I can assure you that all of these things are possible. Are you sure you downloaded the Desktop version, not the web version? ! refresh per minute is right out, i think you might not have it set up properly / web version.

what i downloaded is thinkorswim_installer.exe and has the size of 12.6 MB so I assume this is the workstation software, besides, the web-based demo I recon does not need anything to be setup.
By the way, do you mean that I can get faster refresh rates than every minute? I did not quite understand.

Hi,
I have tested thinkorswim as well, few weeks ago,
It looks very good station for options and swing trading, but less for day trading.
it does not provide Time and Sales, and Level II only shows the market depth, you can not access ECN book, also there is no support for NYSE open book.
I had an online chat with their support and they confirmed the above, also they could not provide a list of supported ECNs.

I must say that their GUI is excellent.

sure you can get faster refresh rates... setup -> general i think. I use the demo versio of TOS, and the quotes for US futures are a fraction behind those that come in via VPN into TT, so they are not delayed by a minute.

can't comment on the stock specific stuff, but there are some limitations on L2 stuff, and no Time and sales is a bummer, agreed.

with thinkorswimm you cannot get faster refresh rates than 1 min. I have asked their support desk on this. The only think you can do is to set the refresh rate to 130 tickers, meaning that in case you trade an instrument that is so liquid that it will get more than 130 trades in less than 1 min you may effectively have higher refresh rate. But this obviously is very restrictive!

To conclude , I wanted to inform everybody that I decided for thinkorswim as the only think that was missing was a time and sales table and this has been provided in the latest release. So I am a satisfied thinkorswim customer now.