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Im currently investigating re-adding multi day swing trading to my repertoire. From a swing trading perspective my only experience has been South African stocks and related trading platforms, brokers etc. Now with me looking into swing trading US equities im starting from scratch.
I use Sierra for intraday futures trading and am extremely happy with it. It seems as though Sierra supports stocks trading. Does anyone here use Sierra for swing trading stocks? What are your thoughts? Happy?
Does anyone have any experience using Sierra for both intraday futures plus swing trading stocks? I presume you would install a separate instance of Sierra for each if using a different broker/data.
So far im leaning towards using TD Ameritrade. Any Sierra users with them? What is there data quality like? I use volume profile extensively and even though this will be for swing trading, im still interested in existing customers thoughts on their data.
The only other platform that i've looked at so far for swing trading is ThinkOrSwim. I've read that the TOS volume profile capabilities are quite basic, which seems to be the case now that im playing around with it. I can't figure out if it's even possible to draw a custom profile for a specified date (or bar) range. But ill carry on playing around with it and give it a fair chance. It seems to be quite popular so I presume there's a reason.
thanks.
Diversification is the only free lunch
Can you help answer these questions from other members on NexusFi?
I have a futures account and an equities account. Separate instances are needed.
I have a TDA equities account. Their equities data is fair. There are occasional spurious price spikes.
Realtime data is tick data; historical data is minute data. You will need to stay connected to collect tick data.
With a TDA account for execution, I would recommend using Sierra's new equities data feed for data, said to be available by EOM May 2014.
@tomgilb, one last question. Do you know if TD Ameritrade offers a trial of their services for existing Sierra customers?
(I have emailed them about this, but they don't seem to understand my question. They seem to think I want to open a futures trading account with them. All I want is to demo their data feed to see how it all works with Sierra before I open a live account with them. I've mailed them again to try and explain my question)
If you are swing trading stocks (or others) for several days, you would be basically looking at the daily, weekly and monthly charts with end of day data... or at least that's how I used to do it 5 years ago, and still do today
For that purpose, all you need in my opinion is a free ninjatrader 7 license (can't place orders from within the platform) and its free EOD kinetick connection.
You would read and analyze your charts after market closure, determine your levels: entry/exit/stop and position size; then log on to your broker platform and input these limit orders as GTC OCO no matter who your broker is.
Consequently, you would only need to check your charts at the end of each day to validate your levels, perhaps update your stops or targets, etc... and then you log in again to your broker platform and update those orders, close position, or whatever.
This is just another idea if you don't manage to sort it out with your current platform/broker, etc...
Good luck
Fadi
Successful people will do what unsuccessful people won't or can't do!
The TDA website no longer mentions that Sierra Chart is a platform choice for their equities data and execution. (SC does not support their TOS futures data). I would guess many at TDA don't even know that an equities API exists. Years ago when I opened my account, it had to be funded to see data, so I doubt you'll get a free trial now.
In the past, I have contacted them at [email protected] but not recently.
Thanks @tomgilb, i've tried to be as clear as possible in my emails to them, but they still seem to have no idea what im talking about. So you seem to be right that most at TDA don't seem to even know that an equities API exists. They just keep telling me to try the ThinkOrSwim demo (which im doing,...and am not very impressed).
Would have been nice to actually see Sierra up and running with equities data before opening a live account, but it doesn't look like that's going to be possible. I'll email the api address with a couple questions, and will then likely open a live account with them.
If my memory serves me, TDA removed the reference to Sierra Chart on their website after they bought TOS. It would not surprise me if their business plan is to discontinue their API for Sierra Chart after attrition reduces its use to a non-profitable level.
Good point, and certainly sounds possible. Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be much else available in terms of trading stocks with Sierra. The 2 contenders seem to be TDA or IB, but ill keep investigating.
