Mac-supported platforms/applications

Hello all,

I've been trading off and on for a year or two now and more intensely in the past couple of months given my abundant free time. I used to work in research in an IB and I'm not too keen to return - trading has become an obsession, I'm afraid.

I'm focused on swing and position-trading primarily US stocks and have been using Fidelity as my broker (a sort of legacy relationship) and stockcharts.com for charts and TA. I am now looking for a more dynamic platform that has good TA options (and possibly a new broker, both in the US and in UK). However, many of the platforms and charting software I see out there are only supported for the Windows OS and I operate on a Mac (I have windows on this Mac on a partitioned drive but it feels like it knows it's on a Mac and is quietly trying to destroy my machine)

Could you kindly direct me to some Mac supported platforms/applications or threads that discuss them. I'm getting a severe headache trawling through all the threads! I would also take powerful web-based applications, usually though, these are limited in functionality.

Thanks!

I'm in the same boat...

www.interactivebrokers.com (charting is a joke, but otherwise one of the best out there, and anyway you cann add another provider like www.prorealtime.com whose charts are pretty good and support macs as well)

&

www.thinkorswim.com

are 2 options.

You should be able to run most Windows stuff if you run Windows in a VM using Parallels or VirtualBox or VmWare.

There is also Wine

MacOSX - The Official Wine Wiki

though Wine may be more problematic. I do know that Wine on Linux has improved greatly. For example QuoteTracker runs fine under Wine on Linux as does DTN IQFeed.

Good point Craig.

there is this too:


Mom always said, “Play nice with others.” Your computer should, too. With Mac OS X, you can use Microsoft Office, connect to industry-standard printers and cameras, and even run Windows.
Every new Mac lets you install Windows XP and Vista and run them at native speeds, using a built-in utility called Boot Camp.

Not very knowledgable about these things, so no idea which of all these options is best.

Also I wonder if running windows on a Mac with whatever tool slows things down substantially.

Thanks for the suggestions.

Markus, on IB do you use the TWS or the web application?

I load up Windows through Boot Camp but I have partitioned a very small space for that drive. I want to say that it doesn't run as well as it would on a PC, but it may be that I've become thoroughly biased towards the Mac OS.

BB, the TWS, but just because I had that downloaded already. Haven't tried the web version.

I am currently demoing TOS as I really do not like IB's clunky platform, and I find it far better to have everything including decent charts integrated in one platform, but these are problems I'm encountering with TOS at the moment:

http://www.trade2win.com/boards/general-trading-chat/66986-think-swim.html

Re windows not running as well on the Mac, you mean its slower, freezes etc ?

That doesn't sound good then does it.

BSD said:

Good point Craig.

there is this too:


Mom always said, “Play nice with others.” Your computer should, too. With Mac OS X, you can use Microsoft Office, connect to industry-standard printers and cameras, and even run Windows.
Every new Mac lets you install Windows XP and Vista and run them at native speeds, using a built-in utility called Boot Camp.

Not very knowledgable about these things, so no idea which of all these options is best.

Also I wonder if running windows on a Mac with whatever tool slows things down substantially.

Click to expand...

Boot Camp is just a dual boot tool - Windows or OSX but not both at the same time. The VM products allow you to run Windows at the same time - either in a native window or full screen. This is far more convenient.

Craig you're definitely the guy here who knows most about this sort of stuff !!!



I get that about convenience running both simultaneously using VM, but what do you think about speed and reliability as in windows not freezing on your Mac under this option, would that be even worse than just using bootcamp because your Mac now has to run 2 major applications at the same time ?

Crikey, if only IB would get their act together and provide a decent platform with charts that deserve that name I'd be happy and not have to go on wild goose chases all the time demoing stuff.

Yes, I had checked out the TWS a few weeks ago and it seemed rather clunky as you say.

re: Windows on the Mac, it seems to run slower and this is a pretty decent machine. But the Parallels Craig mentioned my be better. In the meantime, I'm checking out ProRealtime.

Ah just checking sthg, but yup, BB, great news, looks like we have just found ourselves a third option for us Mac users:

http://www.trade2win.com/boards/futures/44692-best-markets-daytrade.html#post857262

No, not an expert on VM. The last time I used VmWare was quite a few years ago to run Windows NT on a Linux laptop (a very modest 533 Mhz P3 and 192 Mbyte memory). Performance was not bad for Office and Outlook. I even had an Ingress database runing on it at one stage.
It was stable.

Things have moved on from there by quite a bit. VM technology is well established and is being widely used on servers now.

You will take some performance hit on the guest OS (WIndows) but I would guess that it would be something less than 25% overhead. Stability of the host (OSX) should not be an issue and in reality stability of the guest (Windows) should be pretty good - maybe better than on the raw hardware. The guest OS only has access to host OS files that you explicitly grant to it so security is fine.

There are lots of advantages. Backing up an image of the guest is dead simple. You can have multiple guest images if you like. And reserve one for surfing dodgy web sites for example, where it won't compromise the rest of the machine.

You will need adequate memory - the more the better.

I would think that for your requirements one of the VM products would be ideal. You have to buy a copy of Windows to install.

The other thing I mentioned - Wine - is entirely different. And still not very mature. I wouldn't recommend it for the faint hearted.

Dah! Looks geared to futures and commodities trading only.

Thanks Craig mate

Re computers I am very faint hearted I'm afraid hehe.

BB, yup, sorry, forgot you're looking into stocks.

Thanks for the ProRealtime tip, really enjoying it though I'll demo ShareScope on the Windows partition to see how the Windows-based platforms run on the Mac.

Jen