Which bridge between Tradestation and Interactivebrokers for automation?

[laurentc]

Dear all,

We have used Tradestation for both backtesting and as broker for years. We have used Interactivebrokers as broker for even longer (almost 15 years!) Interactivebrokers is probably the best broker out there for most people, from beginners to small hedge funds, because of low-commissions, margin rates, portfolio margin, many worldwide markets in one universal account and so on.

We developed a few automated systems programming using IB's API (ActiveX) and they are working fine, even if that took time / much work to handle the burden of this far-from-perfect API.

We think of accelerating the process of automation by connecting Tradestation to IB, so that we place orders on our Interactivebrokers' account while profiting from both the quality of TS market data and the automated strategies developed in Easylanguage.
Which bridge would you advise?

- We tried Tradebullet (http://www.tradebullet.com/download/) 10 years ago, and it was not working perfectly at that time. Do any of you have used it more recently as a bridge between TS and IB?
- Tradebolt seems to have gone out of business.
- Would you advise MetaOrder RT (RT Soft) for this need? (http://www.traderssoft.com/wp/ts/software/software-ts9/)
- What about using NinjaTrader as a bridge between TS and IB?
- Do you think any other bridge currently available that I am not aware of?

I am almost sure than I have missed a powerful solution to handle this, but for now, I only saw these few solutions, and none seemed to have been deemed as perfect bridges to handle full automation.

Thanks a lot for your help.

 

[Alessiop]

Dear all,

We have used Tradestation for both backtesting and as broker for years. We have used Interactivebrokers as broker for even longer (almost 15 years!) Interactivebrokers is probably the best broker out there for most people, from beginners to small hedge funds, because of low-commissions, margin rates, portfolio margin, many worldwide markets in one universal account and so on.

We developed a few automated systems programming using IB's API (ActiveX) and they are working fine, even if that took time / much work to handle the burden of this far-from-perfect API.

We think of accelerating the process of automation by connecting Tradestation to IB, so that we place orders on our Interactivebrokers' account while profiting from both the quality of TS market data and the automated strategies developed in Easylanguage.
Which bridge would you advise?

- We tried Tradebullet (http://www.tradebullet.com/download/) 10 years ago, and it was not working perfectly at that time. Do any of you have used it more recently as a bridge between TS and IB?
- Tradebolt seems to have gone out of business.
- Would you advise MetaOrder RT (RT Soft) for this need? (http://www.traderssoft.com/wp/ts/software/software-ts9/)
- What about using NinjaTrader as a bridge between TS and IB?
- Do you think any other bridge currently available that I am not aware of?

I am almost sure than I have missed a powerful solution to handle this, but for now, I only saw these few solutions, and none seemed to have been deemed as perfect bridges to handle full automation.

Thanks a lot for your help.

Hi, i remember trade bullet and tradebolt..

I have used WideTrader for many years (is an italian company, this software has been around for 8/9 years), BUT only market orders and not really user friendly. Then I started to use a bridge provided by my broker here in UK that replicates all orders (mkt, stp, lmt..) as generated by TS9, it has some interesting safety tools and exit options and let you monitor strategies through a web interface . It is not available for IB accounts but was faster than WideTrader connected to IB (in my opinion also because of IB pre-trade filtering). Sure IB commissions are low...but slippage can be much more expensive.

So to conclude, if you make few trades and/or you mainly trade @ MKT, widetrader is a reliable software to checkout that works well with TS9 and IB. If latency/slippage is of your concern because of the number of trades than maybe you have to look for somenthing else that links TS9 to IB.

 

[TickCOM]

There are a range of problems apart form the connectivity.

- The TWS/Gateway close automatically every day, and has to be restarted, which is not very automated trading friendly.

- No support for hedging, and IB dosnt keep track on multiple strategies.

- When using a bridge, there is typically no positions handling, mening you have to set the position of your strategies each time you login/boot.

Since you have this problem, you are most probably trading FX, where Oanda recently acquired the TradeStation FX clients. Check the ECO Portal, which also has a TWS Gateway-like API with direct routing to the PrimeXM liquidity bridge, actually better than IB as to the 20+ LP´s aggregated on the bridge (including IB) - free to use. Could be the powerful solution you seek.
www.ecom.onl/ECOportal/