Chrisso,
In general, TS is great. TS works for someone who can code, with little real help, simple to moderately complex systems. If you do subscribe, set the intention to be a real ‘do it yourselfer’ because the help you will get across the long run can not be depended upon to be but a small factor in completing, testing, debugging, and rolling out projects. The ‘mind’ on the TS boards only tolerates a certain degree of complexity and diversity in how things are presented. Go over that limit in complexity or be to vague or general or whatever with your questions and the ‘mind’ will shutdown (or even shut you out)
TS is best hooked to their futures (or stock) brokerage only. All the other instruments, pit traded, fx, international, etc are at this time not amenable to automation, imo. If you got to do it with API's, etc, don't let me discourage you... but...
re: “The business about limit orders being contra-indicated is a little scary.” Not saying it can’t be done. Depends a lot on your timeframea and how far you’re willing to move your limit orders in from where the system would ideally be filled. All my designs now use market orders for both entry, exit, and stop loss conditions. Where the limit or stop order would have been, a market order is placed. Got tired of missing fills by a couple of tick, etc…
re: “Do the 3 built in stops usually work OK?” Yes, but I hear the occasional horror story. ‘Everyone’ has trades, fills, broker errors with their ‘name on it’ just waiting to happen. With TS, I trade futures exclusively and built in stops have never been adequate system exits for me. Had to pay the price and design and implement much more complex, proactive, robust exits. btw, I’m a below average Pascal code monkey, but I make it up with determination…
It has taken me literally years to develop some of my projects…
re: “I see from the TS website & earlier posts that the latest version allows for accessing the highs and lows of the current bar and trading intra-bar. This feature suits my trading style - without it TS would be a non-starter.” Intrabar is a good feature addition, better for testing than live trading. Having had to come up the hard way, signals are built off a higher time frame, but I actually run and execute systems on a tick chart with market orders. Recently, the capabilities for using multiple time frames have been GREATLY enhanced by a subscriber contribution called ADE, which allows a user designed global collection structure (a rudimentary database if you will). Tough learning curve for me, but worth it in multiples…
re: “Do you find that you are able to auto-trade sufficiently often to get the free rental” That depends on your timeframe(s) and system(s). Again, TS is best hooked to their futures (or stock) brokerage only. With a linked brokerage account, the platform is only $100 per month plus exchange fees. You would only need to start up at a scale to make that expense an insignificant amount and not give any consideration about making a minimum number of trades per month. Again, this is just my opinion, but anyone who gives commission, platform, and feed costs a consideration because it’s ‘damaging’ the bottom line has a problem with something very fundamental about playing this game – usually it’s under capitalization, sometimes overtrading, sometimes undertrading, sometimes…
re: “and are there really any alternatives to TS for an 'off the shelf' rule based trading system” Nothing’s quite as 'ubiquitous' as TS yet… more and more are rolling their own! The objects are available. If they don't add subminute (to the thousanth second) time-stamping soon, they'll be left by the wayside...
all the best,
zdo
