My impression of IB's TWS is not very good. I like their commission, however. I trade micro e-mini and I rather trade 5-10 contracts of micro futures than 1 ES. Obviously I scale in and out...
Also, I had an account with Ninja, closed it I did not like the platform and I hated the software cost! I still use ToS with Ameritrade if I wanted to trade silver e-mini I would do it there. Is it me or all other platforms are dwarfed by ToS? Sadly their commission is high for micro contracts. I never tried Tradestation and I am worn out of all these account transfers. Cheers and good trading!
The following user says Thank You to AndrasNagy for this post:
Yes, ToS seems to be quite popular on every social media trading forum I run into these days.
About the exhausting transfers of accounts and brokers, it is indeed very tiresome, in fact I think this is not something that's going to end anytime soon. I've more than half a dozen Demat and trading accounts and only 2 banks accounts
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Broker: Primary Advantage Futures. Also ED&F and Tradestation
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Always heard that TOS got very laggy at high volume/high volatility times - no experience myself. Tradestation is nothing special either and I think their commissions are higher than places like IB.
I left TOS years ago, for many reasons, which included issues with their data (tick data was bundled, and therefore incomplete and inaccurate), as well as performance and other issues.
With that said, it is a very good platform if you are trading stock and equity index options, which was my original interest and actually what it was designed for, by professional option traders. You can trade futures on it, but, as you say, the commissions are high (for the regular minis, at least they were at that time), and they do not provide any offsetting value that makes it worth your while to use them, as they do for stock options. They are, in my view at least, not a good choice for futures. I like their charts well enough -- ignoring the data and performance issues -- and you can trade futures on it if you like, and if you don't mind the commissions.
So the moral is that different platforms have different strengths, and appeal to different traders in different ways.
To be honest, there are differences between brokers and platforms, but they are usually not too critical. Basically, people tend to use and stay with what they like and are used to.
Bob.
When one door closes, another opens.
-- Cervantes, Don Quixote
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