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Is Thinkorswim a good Platform for Futures Trading?
An update to this, during a volatile market, ie the recent mini flash crash in crude, 300 ticks in 1 minute, TOS did not keep up, the lag extended to seconds, and price was off 20-50 ticks at times.
Of course Sierra Chart with Rithmic hasn't been reliable for me yet either, still trying to work out the issues, so I guess no platform is perfect.
Can you help answer these questions from other members on NexusFi?
I saw a lot of quotes on TOS lag, frankly I am disturbed. I have got my a$$ handed to me thinking I had good system using paper trades and think on demand with success.
Not using volume profile is one of my suggestions. For me it has caused my platform to lock up with error messages for news and non news based situations, making me restart it. Just my personal opinion. If you want to get the optimum data rates only use 4-8 charts. Anything more causes problems imo. I use the paper trading platform as well when watching the market because the DOM has pretty much an instant price feed.
Current problem I am facing are windows randomly freezing during the day. Sometimes it's hard to notice. This is one that I have been experiencing more so just recently and actually caused me trouble this week.
I've been using TOS for more than 4 years now. I wasn't entirely happy when they sold out to TDA, but at least TDA is attempting to embrace the "TOS Culture", especially for their legacy customers.
I traded ES and TF for a few months last year, after months of testing. Back then I noticed that the charts lagged the DOM ladder, but I still got fills at my price - I noticed no slippage - and that's what counts, isn't it?
For futures trading it would be good if they allowed users to select the Tick count rather than have set values.
I wanted to get back into futures recently, and I was very impressed with NT. I was not impressed with all the costs and what I considered (compared to TOS) complex arrangements/options for data and brokers. It turned out some guy at Mirus got my name and wanted to help me out, but I passed on the whole idea.
I am able to muddle through thinkscript but totally lost with custom indicators in NT.
So now I'm back to option spreads on good ole' TOS. Missing the excitement of day trading, I'm currently in the infant stages of day trading AAPL ATM weeklys live. So far, it's working out quite well. I got the idea from a thread on this site:
Day Trading Options
As promised, this will be the first of several threads on trading options. I will include my very safe Diagonal Spread Trading (of which I have had no losses for a long time) and Adjustments in later threads.
I hope there are some …
. It seems more relaxing and still as profitable as futures; and since I negotiated a rate of 1.25/contract when Sosnoff was still there, the commissions are much less as well.
As a final note, you just can't beat TOS for support and education. After all, they have 3-4 heavy duty option traders teaching and talking strategy for over 2-4 hours everyday - and they seem to enjoy doing it. They are recorded for later viewing & Don Kaufman is really a treat to listen to.
Just wanted to mention that TDAmer/TOS is 'reallowing' futures trading for IRA accounts, if anyone is interested in that. They are the only brokerage I know of that provides an FDIC insured bank account for futures cash sweeps and IRA futures trading plus, has a good/transparent enough (I think) financial position where I'm comfortable having my IRA over there, to use partially for futures trading.
How do you check the memory usage and default? I would like to try that cause my TOS is literally 2 seconds behind my DOM and Sierra Chart... and I have 10 mb on my computer.
You can trade Futures with your TD Ameritrade roth account only if you can maintain 25K balance. I was trying to trade futures with my ira and they would not let me , here is their email that was sent to me.
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Thank you for your application to trade futures in your IRA. Unfortunately, we are unable to approve your request at this time. Your account must have a net liquidating value of at least $25,000 to be approved for futures trading.
Please let us know when your account meets this requirement, and we’ll be happy to review your application again. Please note that in order to have your request resubmitted, you must reply to this email.
We regret that we cannot agree to your current request, but please rest assured that TD Ameritrade remains completely committed to supporting you as you pursue your financial goals. Feel free to call Client Services at 866-839-1100 if you have any questions or need assistance. We’re available 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
