TradeStation Reviews

TradeStation promote the fact that you can use the platform to autotrade, yet when you take steps to put this into action you receive dire warnings that Limit Orders may not function properly. When I took this up with their trainer Stan Dash, who had travelled to London to give training on programming in EL, he said he was unaware of this error message. He later informed me that he does not autotrade himself, but if he has a trade left open he asks a colleague to keep an eye on it. Not impressed. Which is a real shame because TS is clearly a very powerful piece of kit - but probably overdue for a ground up rewrite. Guess I'll be subscribing to Ninja shortly. More on this at investmentadvice-online.com

I been with TS for 3 years now and I am very happy with the platform. I have couple automated strategies that run on hundred of charts. I am not aware of any other software package that would be able to do this. TS have no limit to the amount of data you can monitor at one time! Most charting applications limit you, in TS the limit will be you hardware or windows setup.

The most important thing is how easy you can put down an idea with them and back test it. This for my (an automated trader) is the most important feature. Data is clean and reliable I have 500 charts open and I pick any and compare it to my broker's single chart and tick by tick is the same. Now this is reliability.

Now TS is slow to make changes and add new features. I guess if I have to choose between reliability and having a bunch of buggy features I prefer reliability.

I have couple TS with NinjaTrader and now I can send my orders anywhere. This combination is a very reliable one. I can choose any broker. TS has many add-on and you can always count with any indicator to be publish in EL so you do not have to learn one more programming language.

The charts have no competition. You can scroll resize in a flash and they are very crisp and nice to look at. You can insert indicator, paint bars and showme. This give you a lot of flexibility to view what you want. One important fact is that you can control when calculations are done. You can choose between tick by tick or end of bar. This is helpful if you have many charts because it save you CPU.

For some reason tick charts have restrictions. What I do is I develop an idea in 1 min charts then I ported to tick charts when I am done. I did find some problem in auto-trading when you turn IOG sometimes your real-time position and TS does not match anymore and you get a pop up warning. I solved that problem by using NinjaTrader to send my orders.

As a combined charting, analysis, data and order platform, TS is a great idea.

Unfortunately, the limitations of the implementation of EasyLanguage having glaring flaws which could be relatively easily addressed - indeed, the fact that MultiCharts have cloned TS and provided solutions, and Bamboo coded comprehensive EL workarounds in his EL collections, arrays and Maps DLL solution just shows that it can be done. But TS havent done it.

Additionally their failure to implement multi-timeframe tick and time based charting, and exotic (but useful) chart variations such as range bars demonstrates a consistent failure to comprehensively understand systematic trading requirements.

so while the TS platform tries to be all things to everyone for stocks options and futures, it fails quite miserably.

Although TS has recently launched a UK office, the fact that they STILL havent included european futures for LIFFE or Eurex is the nail in the coffin.

Check out NeoTicker instead. TS is ok for US markets, but there are other platforms that do more, better.

I have used the "old" version of Tradestation for about 2 years now.
Overall its v good but it is fiddly. More importantly it is now no longer supported by Tradestation themselves.
So anyone wanting to buy it ( and you still can) I would point towards the online version which I have just moved on to. I would not buy 2000i if you are new to trading - you will need support and it simply is no longer there.

Tradestation Easy Language (in which you can write all sorts of indicators, studies, strategies, etc) is a joy to a non programmer and the tradestation forums are wonderful for getting help.

I've been a TS user for several years now... started with TradeStation 2000i and then went onto v7 and now v8 as of today. I Trade futures only.

Generally very satisfied!

Electronic order execution is lightning fast, and very resilient. Have not had any problems ever with any of my order placements.

Data provision is good, tho I have had a few niggles with very occasional slow data.

The platform itself seems to go from strength to strength - the addition of the Matrix ladder interface for discretionary trading was a major improvment to order entry. Yet more improvements with this release of version 8.

Strategy trading and implementation is also excellent - I have traded an easylanguage trading strategy using the TS automated execution features and it is a good feature! Fast execution of strategy defined trades with no user intervention at all.

Compared to other brokers such as IB, TradeStation wipes the floor with them. One of my trading buddies uses IB and over the last six weeks, during every major news announcement when the market has moved FAST, IB has gone down.

Sure, TS has its minor flaws and weaknesses, but for $99 a month I have no justifiable complaints at all. If I was prepared to pay $500 per month per market for Trading Technologies then I would do so and be sure I had a near perfect platform and complain loudly if it wasnt, but TS is great value for money and more than good enough for me to trade protably with.

I have always been impressed with Tradestation since TS2Ki. Last year I tried the subscription version of TS which incidentally was quite expensive at $200 p/m for the base platform, before any data feed/exchange fees. I thought this was too expensive and subsequently cancelled the subscription.

Early this year, I created a Tradestation 7 brokerage account. The fee is now more manageable - $99 per month. Their trade commission fees are very competitive and together with the data/exchange fees costs around the same or less than a reliable data supplier such as Esignal. I am generally very happy with Tradestation in terms of performance and reliability.

The TS7 software is very powerful and allows you to create all types of studies - indicators, strategies and much more. The language is a spinoff of Pascal so unless you are comfortable with and can program this software is not really for you if you want to make maximum use of it.

They have recently extended their data servers and now store huge amounts of data for stocks, futures and indices - much more extensive than Esignal. For example you get 10+ Year Intra-Day Equities data, 20+ Year Intra-Day Futures data, 30 Days of tick data.... etc

They all sorts of addons such as radarscreen which is a scanning software, option station for trading options etc...

I personally love the software and the environment and am currently very happy and plan on being their customer for the forseeable future...

I will be happy to answer any questions anyone might have.

Regards,

Imran

I use TS ver4 coupled into esignal using dynastore. The charts are excellent and you can write your own systems then backtest the results over a number of years using the built in optimiser. This works very well for both daytrading and longer term position trading.

Ver 4 has been superceeded by 2000i then I believe there is an even newer version which is not suitable for Europe as yet. I tried 2000i but found it unstable. TS is expensive, I paid $2400.00 a number of years ago but the only other product I have tried which I think is as good is the complete package from CQG. Again expensive for a beginner but very professional.Please note I have rated the support at 1 becuase ver4 is no longer supported directly buOmega but there are user groups who are very helpful. The manuals are excellent.