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Not trying to start a flame war or trash anything, just looking for honest thoughts and experiences.
I've been wanting to use sierra charts server side order service, which utilizes Trading Technologies (TT). Apparently only a few FCMs support this, but I've also now found that my introducing broker has decided not to support TT as well citing that TT has had outages in the past. Would anyone consider Trading Technologies TT track-record spotty/unreliable? Or generally, have they worked just fine with a rare hiccup here and there? I'm trying to determine, if this is this happens to be a broker specific policy and doesn't necessarily reflect the overall quality of the service.
Can you help answer these questions from other members on NexusFi?
There are differences between all data-feed and execution service providers. You can read a lot about how Sierra Chart engineers feel about some of the data providers and brokers they work with on their support boards. I recently switched to TT from CQG and use TT only for execution and keep Sierra for Charting. I hope to move back to Sierra once they offer their own order execution through AMP ( which may be a while).
There are professionals on this site that use just about all of the different data-feeds, brokers and techniques. For them, mastering the psychology matters more than any one particular tool or information source.
Rithmic, CQG and TT have all had very public and embarrassing outages or other issues in the last few months. A Rithmic issue cost traders money as I recall, although in many cases the broker made them whole. I don't recall if everyone came out all right. I think it was generally ironed out after some time and some additional stress on all concerned.
Since it's the title of this thread, in general TT has enjoyed a good reputation. (I have no experience with them and can't comment.) The others have also.
The thing is to keep your head and not get mad or afraid and hit the button to get you out if you have a position on according to your platform that you don't recognize or think is closed. Contact the broker. Hitting that sell button may just create a new short position if you were right about being flat and the data was wrong.
Other than that, there are risks of trading and you mitigate them as well as you can. Keep positions small enough. Enter stops (if that is part of your loss control. Also, realize that stops are not perfect protection in a suddenly fast-moving or illiquid market.) Don't keep a whole lot of money in your broker account that you aren't using actively for margin (I hope this is a no-brainer: if it's in your account with the broker, they can get it if there's a problem; if it's not, they will have more difficult time. Also, not having it in your account may stop you from overcommitting when you should not use it. Protect yourself against yourself, too.)
Bob.
When one door closes, another opens.
-- Cervantes, Don Quixote
Trading: Primarily Energy but also a little Equities, Fixed Income, Metals and Crypto.
Frequency: Many times daily
Duration: Never
Posts: 5,049 since Dec 2013
Thanks Given: 4,386
Thanks Received: 10,207
For decades TTs XTrader was the #1 Prop Futures Trading software. TT pioneered the Ladder/DOM and Autospreaders. They were (are?) the Flagship Prop-Trading software.
XTrader infrastructure relied upon your Broker having their own exchange gateways and your software then communicated with those gateways. As such your 'connectivity' was broker specific and dependent. Like everything there were good and bad brokers. My broker (Advantage Futures) had multiple exchange gateways for each exchange. In the very rare circumstances there was a gateway issue, you just redirected your trading client to the unaffected gateways.
XTrader has been retired and replaced with a 'New TT' / 'Cloud TT' / or just 'TT'. This relies upon a cloud based front end and a co-located execution engine. If you are using TT and running Autospreaders/ADL and weren't co-located in the XTrader model, then this is a MASSIVE execution speed increase. These are really really fast! The big difference to XTrader though, is everything is run and maintained by TT themselves and everything is in 'their black box' that you can see very little off. So in the XTrader model I could see when a gateway went down, in the new TT model I just lose connection and am in the dark.
Getting back to the Op, how does this effect SC? In terms of 'software' they still offer a product with few (if any) alternatives but your question is about data and I'm sorry but I honestly have no idea. I don't know how SC (or other providers using the TT backbone) connect and leverage the 'new' TT infrastructure - it might not use it at all. So why say all the above then? Well having been a 15+ year TT user though I would say that new TT outages are more severe than they were on XTrader but not sure how that compares to Rithmic & CQG. Just trying to give a perspective from a TT user.
TT had issues when migrating from the famous X-Trader to the new TT environment. It is a huge change from the technical side and they did have few outages but these have been resolved as far as I know. There is a good reason why banks and propfirms are using TT, Stelllar, or any other quite expensive platform for trading.
Trading: Primarily Energy but also a little Equities, Fixed Income, Metals and Crypto.
Frequency: Many times daily
Duration: Never
Posts: 5,049 since Dec 2013
Thanks Given: 4,386
Thanks Received: 10,207
They had a 20 min ICE outage last week, where orders were left on the exchange with no way to cancel, so not completely resolved.
One of my most frustrating things about new TT vs XTrader, is lack of communication/information. As already mentioned XTrader had a lot more information in the audit trail about what was going on plusI would call my broker and they would tell me (remember it was broker specific hardware)
what the problem is
if I can bypass the problem how,
if not what their eta is on fixing it and finally
afterwards a recap of what went wrong, why and what they will do to make sure it won't happen again.
With new TT I get
no information, just "engineers are looking at it", with no eta
a promise of an explanation of what happened once they resolve it - which almost never happens
No, I am on SIM and I only used their SIM. I just know a friend who used it a lot on live until he movet to cryptos,both new TT and Xtrader, and he said that this one or Stellar is the best by far despite the price. It is amazingly easy to create all kind of order types in ADL. I am not a trading veteran but I havent seen anything like that before. I can imagine that it does give an edge for the bigger players.
