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Is Thinkorswim a good Platform for Futures Trading?
I'm running tos on a lenovo yoga 3 with a 1.3 gHz processor and 8 gb of RAM and it's working just fine.
I have 9 charts up each with extremely complicated programming for one indie and a basic indie as well.
Settings are at the max RAM and 2gb for the min.
Can you help answer these questions from other members on NexusFi?
I'm only trying to help people avoid the pain I've experienced, hopefully so they don't get overly involved/ committed/ past a point of no return so to say - there are several better platforms for trading futures (futures are John Wayne & Clint Eastwood, stocks and options not so much.)
The studies I use are:
VSA_Lite (custom via swimtrader)
RSI Mechanical Trading System by Eric (custom per me)
Time marks at hour, half hour, fifteen and forty-five minute marks (TS_VolumeChannel)
Price_LineStudy (I posted the code here in ToS downloads/ indicators)
All of the above (plus a trading forum I started) can be found a thinkscripter dot com.
Eventually I'm going to switch to Sierra Charts once I can get the above studies coded for Sierra.
There's a bunch of features within Sierra (nothing custom, standard stuff, ie Open Market Depth Window, bid/ ask Delta bars) that are very useful for scalping /CL.
Some of the biggest hurdles for ToS is that they do not have true tick, bid/ ask data, the memory leaks, updates with very little (if at all) documentation etc.
Also for the Forex folks ToS is/ has a dealing desk (or at least it was when I traded the cash market.)
Yes I understand ToS is an options platform but I've been using the damn thing for so long now (along with the aforementioned custom scripts) that right now I don't have time to tackle a new learning curve, chart package etc - but I'm slowly leaning into Sierra.
I feel for you. It sucks you're having these issues! I love this platform and I've demoed about every one out there.
For the price (free) it's a great deal and performs pretty damn smooth for me.
I have a custom indi, and 2 volatility based bands up on 9 different charts at one time.
Of course, with programming and chart reading, it would be nice to have the bid/ask with tick data but it's not crucial to my success.
Basically you just need a different platform and I think you'll be much happier. There's not a platform that's made for everyone.
My experience is same as Massive 1. I only trade futures, CL, GC, NG, KC, CC etc and never had problem with TOS in 5 years., I do not look at DOM, bid-ask etc. to trade. I actually called TOS help desk and asked them to freeze my DOM. They were confused by my request as they apparently spent lot of money to get bid- ask, times and sales , level 11 etc. So everything on my TOS platform as far as jumping monkeys are concerened are frozen ( deactivated).
I understand some traders who need tick data etc. TOS may not be the platform. But i have traded 20,000 contracts over the years so far, TOS is the only one i use. I have never used any other platform so can not comapre TOS VS other platforms. Use Trade station from time to time but 98% of trading is on TOS.
Note: I have couple of standard indicators on the charts as an eye candy.
My posts are not meant to give financial advice neither do they imply that my method is special. "THIS IS WHAT I COULD BE IF I HAD A TOTALLY CARE FREE STATE OF MIND DURING TRADING" Mark Douglas.
Only an FYI - if you want to make your ToS DOM static go to the main screen, upper right corner, setup, general, active trader, Autocenter AT, adjust the seconds (secs) to I don't know 20,000 (obviously 3600 per hour.)
-Bill
PS thanks for all the replies for, 2015 I'll do my best to not be as much a bitch
