Best Day Trading Platform

Useful links

Market Data Costs - access market data fees for various markets in multiple countries.

IB Charting - short video of charting historical data, adding trendlines and rogue data points for IB TWS.

Option Strategy Lab - IB tool that enables customers to evaluate trading scenarios based upon their own forecasts for underlying share prices.

Investors' Marketplace - free online Interactive Brokers' forum that connects individual traders and investors, institutions and third-party service providers. This is a great resource where you can find investment advisors, brokers, hedge funds.

Python language - Interactive Brokers step-by-step API Setup Guide

API Reference Guide - TWS API documentation, housed on Github.

Guide to portfolio building - access the guide that explains how to create an investment strategy based on the market analysis and fundamentals, run backtests and make adjustments to the strategy as needed.

IBKR Traders' Insight - venue for market-related articles and commentary, covering an array of asset classes and topics.

IBKR Quant Blog - Interactive Brokers blog to assits quantitative professional who seek to visualize, interpret and analyze financial information.

TradeStation Service Fees

TradeStation Market Data Pricing - access pricing of real-time and delayed index, equity and equity options, futures and futures options data, as well as foreign market data, market news feeds and fundamental data.

Short video of mobile charting - access TradeStation live data charting on phone.

Trade Manager- learn how to create TradeManager window to display trade and account activity.

TradeStation Market Insight - provides daily market insights, ideas about potential trading opportunities, and education that is designed to help to become a better self-directed investor.

Easy Language - video introduction to EasyLanguage to learn how to create and modify simple indicators based on the trading ideas, and then apply them to a chart or RadarScreen.

TradeStation Forum - access support, education and training services and materials to learn more about TradeStation software and services.

Charting Guide - beginners' charting guide.

Backtesting - guide of how to backtest your ideas in AmiBroker

Backtesting systems for future contracts - read article of how to backtest systems for future contracts

Market Screener Plus- a free eSignal's feature that allows to search through 1000s of individual stocks.

Advanced GET Scanner - a guide that explains the features that are unique to Advanced GET Edition of the eSignal, such as dashboard, the Advanced GET Scanner, Advanced GET studies, and the Advanced GET drawing tools.

eSignal add-ons- access a list of eSignal apps and add-ons designed for every level of trader, including Fundamental Data and Market Profile.

JavaScript for EFS video - watch training video that educates viewer on programming concepts using JavaScript, the foundation language for eSignal Formula Script (EFS).

Trade Desk Calendar - view significant upcoming financial events

Market Updates - browse a feed of the latest market news stories

Trading 101 - learn the basics of technical analysis and day trading

NinjaTrader New - browse the latest news surrounding the NinjaTrader platform

Tastyworks Pricing — how much it costs to trade with Tastyworks

Tastytrade Live — A live educations video feed

Help Center — a support page for common issues

Technology page — The latest technology that Tastyworks uses

Support - A place to get customer service, open a ticket or phone TT to solve an issue.  

Markets - The markets that users have access to when using Trading Technologies 

Pricing - View how much it costs to use the TT platform. 

Community - TT’s community section is an environment in which users share ideas and help each other solve issues. 

Planning - Those new to E*Trade can benefit from a signup bonus.

Knowledge - A page to gain insight into strategies, and which may suit your situation

Core Portfolios - Managed portfolios to help get a quick, reliable start to investing

Pricing - Up-to-date prices of commission

Order routing report - Quarterlyorder routing report by E*Trade

Background

Used by: Professionals, Money Managers, Hedge Funds and Institutional Clients.

Interactive Brokers was founded in 1978 and are one of the biggest electronic US-based brokers. The broker is regulated by several financial authorities globally, including top-tier ones like the UK's Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) and the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). IB clients traded $100 billion worth of stocks in December 2019, which tripled to $295 billion in March 2020. That's almost double of Ray Dalio's Bridgewater AUM. IB's client's AUM is $180 billion, which is also more than Bridgewater's AUM. In this Interactive Brokers review, we will provide useful insights into the trading platform and highlight its capabilities and limitations.

Used by: Day Traders and Fully Automated Traders

TradeStation is an online securities brokerage, integrating software’s backtesting and automated functions. Tradestation provides real-time market data from all major exchanges and trade order placement and execution with those exchanges for both the securities and futures markets. This professional-grade platform offers charting capabilities, advanced tools and trading strategies backed by research and development by many 3rd party vendors.

Several TradeStation reviews have demonstrated the undeniable advantage of this day trading platform and brokerage.

Used by: Technical Analyst and Systems Developers

AmiBroker is comprehensive technical analysis platform designed with advanced traders in mind. In addition to detailed technical charts, AmiBroker offers some of the most in-depth strategy back testing options available to traders. AmiBroker (1.0) was released in 1995 as one of the first technical analysis programs.

Used by: Technical Analysts

E-Signal offers customizable charts and advanced analytical tools, including stock scanner, automated systems, market profile, advanced volume analysis, and so on. In addition to being a comprehensive charting platform, featuring hundreds of technical indicators, eSignal is also a trading platform. It can connect to more than 50 different brokers and execute trades directly from inside the platform.

Used by: Technical Analysts

NinjaTrader is a relatively new platform having been founded in 2003. The US software company has a decorated awards cabinet, and currently serves 60,000 traders from over 150 different countries.

NinjaTrader offers a lot of tools for technical analysis, making it geared towards chart trading. The platform has a ton of customizable indicators, along with real-time analysis and great charting presentation. 

Quant Savvy has compared NinjaTrader with TradeStation and MultiCharts in the algorithmic trading review which was originally released in 2018. Since then the platform has released multiple updates which we discuss in this NinjaTrader review.

Used by: Active Traders, especially good for Options Trading

Tastywokrs is a new and upcoming brokerage for active traders. Founded in 2017, Tastyworks has quickly garnered the attention that accommodates the recent rise in demand for Options trading.

Tastyworks was founded in Chicago, where its headquarters are. Founder Tom Sosnoff was also behind thinkorswim, a successful trading platform aimed at both beginners and advanced traders.

Tastyworks does offer stocks, futures and ETFs, but its predominantly focuses on Options trading. In this Tastywork review we will discuss trading platform's tools, charting, indicators, as well as its costs and limitations.

Used by: Automated Traders and Professional Traders

Founded in 1994, Trading Technologies is an independent software vendor with an extremely sophisticated infrastucture that faciliates fast algorithmic trading. HQ in Chicago, TT has almost 1000 employees on LinkedIn.

Trading Technologies has built up a reputation for being the fastest trading platform, in which they have the sophisticated and powerful infrastructure, yet is open to retail traders.

Used by: Mobile traders, Options traders, low-activity traders

E*Trade is an electronic trading platform founded by William Porter and Bernard Newcomb in 1982. In 2018, the company had 4.9 million brokerage accounts, and a margin receivables balance of $9.56 billion. E*Trade acquired OptionsHouse in 2016.

E*Trade is headquartered in Arlington, Virginia, but has offices dotted around the United States.

Whilst the company has seen great success during its long trading history, it began it fall behind when competitors began offering zero commission stock trading. As this was becoming the norm, E*Trade decided to follow suit in 2019, and has since caught a second wind.

Affiliations or Secondary Platforms

Interactive Brokers API is compatible with nearly all best day trading platforms and software.

IBKR Lite - In 2019 the company launched a second tier of their service. You get unlimted free trades of stocks and ETFs listed on US stock exchanges.

TradeStation Global - in partnership with Interactive Brokers, TradeStation Global offers a direct access to 125 markets and exchanges in UK, Europe, Asia and North America, including global equities, forex, futures and more.

TradeStation US - offers to trade US markets to access US equities and ETFs, futures and options.

AmiBroker related 3rd party sites

eSignal partners

NinjaTrader Ecosystem: a search engine for apps and services that integrate with the NinjaTrader platform. There are also numerous brokers and partners that are compatible with the NinjaTrading platform.

As mentioned above, Tom Sosnoff (the Founder of Tastyworks) was the man behind Thinkorswim, a well-known trading platform that still operates.

Tastytrade is also under a sister's name because its a part of the Tastyworks company, which is where the educational content resides.

Trading Technologies has various partnerships, having teamed up with the likes of CN First, HDR Global Trading, CoinFLEX, TradeStation Group, GDAX, Interxion and many others. TradeStation has a long list of distributors. Some include: ABN AMRO Clearing, ADM Investor Services, Advantage Futures, AMP Global Clearing, Aarna Capital, Bank of America Merrill Lynch + more.

Morgan Stanley announcing in February 2020 that they would acquire E*Trade, many new partners and affiliations will likely begin working with E*Trade.

Market Access for Live Trading

Interactive Brokers

TradeStation

AmiBroker

eSignal

NinjaTrader

Tastyworks

Trading Technologies

Stocks

US markets, European, 250 Markets worldwide. Offers to buy and sell stocks and other securities in 135 markets in 33 countries.

All Major US markets EuroNext Indices, Commodities Derivatives, Interest Rate Eurex and German Stock Exchanges

No Asian Stock Exchanges, No access to London Stock Exchanes

Live trading requires a separate brokerage. The only brokerage compatible for live trading is Interactive Brokers

N/A

N/A

Only US-listed stokcs are available for trade

B3, euronext, ICE_L (common stocks), ICE (7x) stocks

Commodities

IB Spot Gold, IB Spot Silver to gain long and short exposure to the gold and silver markets.

N/A

N/A

N/A

N/A

N/A

Futures

CBOE, CBOT, CME, CME Crypto, ICE Bakkt Bitcoin, ICE Futures, NYMEX, NYSE, OneChicago, SMFE , Montreal Exchange, Mexican Derivatives Exchange

CBOT, CME, NYMEX, COMEX, CBOE, MGE, ICE U.S

N/A

N/A

CME, CBOT, COMEX NYMEX, EUREX, ICE, ICE UK

Only US-listed Futures are available for trade

EEX, MX, CME, Eurex, ICE, OSE, NFX, JSE, ASX, B3, BIST, BitMEX, CFE, TOCOM, TFX, TFEX, SGX, and more

Options

Equity, index and currency. Option contracts might be traded on the major exchanges in North America, Europe and Asia. Options markets: Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE), CME Group, as well as smaller markets, such as the Korea Stock Exchange (KSE) or the Mexican Derivatives Exchange (MEXDER).

US Stock Exchanges

N/A

N/A

N/A

Only US-listed Options are available for trade

SGX, OSE, NFX, NDAQ_EU, MX, MOEX, MEXDER, MEFF, JSE, LSE, JSE, IDEM, ASX, B3, BIST, CME, EUREX, and more

CFDs

Only clients from Interactive Brokers (U.K.) Limited are eligible to trade with CFDs. Compared to other products and competitors, IB offers an average range of CFDs, mainly stock and stock index CFDs.

N/A

N/A

N/A

N/A

Euronext, ICE L

Forex

Forex trading is unavailable for US customers.

Forex Exchange data only

N/A

N/A

N/A

N/A

N/A

Mutual Funds

Mutual Fund Marketplaces provides access to 25,982 countries and territories and includes many prominent fund families, including funds from Allianz, American Funds, BlackRock, Fidelity, Franklin Templeton, Invesco, MFS and PIMCO. Therefore, IB does not charge custody fee.

Access to over 2000 mutual funds, including Allianz, BlackRock, Fidelity etc. See full list

N/A

N/A

N/A

N/A

N/A

Hedge Funds

Interactive Brokers clients identified as Accredited Investors and Qualified Purchasers under SEC rules can view information about independent Hedge Funds available through IBKR's online Hedge Fund Marketplace.

no access to hedge funds

N/A

N/A

N/A

N/A

N/A

Bonds

Access to US government securities, 25,696 corporate bonds, 862,018 municipal securities and 25,571 CDs. Out of all government and corporate bonds available at IB, 1.4 million are so-called municipal bonds: these are fixed income investments issued by local US governments, cities, states or counties, but they are tradable only for US residents.

You can trade government, corporate and municipal bonds for a commission of $14.95 plus an additional $5 per bond.

N/A

N/A

N/A

N/A

US Treasury bonds: KCG, FENICS, NFI, BrokerTec

ETFs

Equity and bond indices on 28 exchanges in 14 countries, including ETFs and leveraged ETFs.

N/A

N/A

N/A

Only US-listed ETFs are available for trade

N/A

Futures Options

CBOT, CME, NYMEX, COMEX, CBOE, MGE, ICE U.S

N/A

N/A

CME, NYMEX, CBOT, COMEX

Only US-listed Futures Options are available to trade

N/A

Crypto

Bitcoin and Ethereum ETNs and Bitcoin Futures: Bitcoin and Ether ETNs are traded on the Stockholm Stock Exchange and the US OTC (Pink) markets Bitcoin Index is available on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) and on the CME Group and Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE) Bitcoin futures are available on the CME Group and Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE)

Bitcoin (BTCUSD), Bitcoin Cash (BCHUSD), Ethereum (ETHUSD), Litecoin (LTCUSD), XRP (XRPUSD)

N/A

N/A

Bitcoin Futures

N/A

CoinFLEX, BITSO, Coinbase, DERBIT

IPOs

IB monitors for upcoming IPOs and provides customers the ability to enter orders in advance of the day at which trading begins in the secondary market. The list of currently active IPOs are available in Account Management

ClickIPO' app allows Tradestation clients to access IPOs. Clients can place a conditional order for shares through their TradeStation account, and if shares are allocated, they will be placed directly into their account

N/A

N/A

N/A

N/A

N/A

Direct Market Access

Interactive Brokers provides direct access to markets.

Tradestation provides direct access to markets.

N/A

N/A

NinjaTrader can provide direct access to markets through Continuum

Tastyworks doesn't have Direct Market Access

Trading Technologies provide DMA in one of four exchange-supported network configurations using the BVMF gateway. The four models of connection are explained here.

Account Types

IBKR offers Individuals with the option of opening an Individual, Joint, Trust, IRA, UGMA/UTMA, Friends and Family, Family Office or Small Business Account. Institutions may choose from Advisor, Money Manager, Broker & FCM, Prop Trading Group or Hedge Fund accounts. IBKR also offers specialized accounts for Compliance Officers, Administrators, Educators, Referrers or Hedge Fund Allocators.

Tradestation offers individuals with Individual, Joint with Right of Survivorship, Joint Tenants in Common, Custodial, Traditional IRA, Roth IRA, SEP IRA, Simple IRA, Trust, Corporation, General Partnership, Limited Partnership, LLC, Sole Proprietorship. Institutions have access to brokerage services, securities lending, institutional execution services, advisory services.

N/A

N/A

N/A

Trading Technologies offers two accounts: Standard and Pro Standard is priced at $700 p/m (subscription) or $50 p/m with $1,000 CAP (transactional), and is aimed at professional traders. This plan includes most features, such as browser-based access, live trading, real-time market data and third-party algos. Pro is priced at $1,400 p/m (subscription), or $400 p/m with $1,800 CAP (transactional), and is aimed at advanced trader who want more customization, powerful tools and APIs. This plan has access to the autospreader, autotrader, aggregator, ADL dashboard and TT .NET SDK.

Winner: Interactive Brokers

_{Ranking Methodology: Very simple ranking, which day trading platform has more market access. Which broker has more facilities for different day traders including institutional clients.}

This Interactive Brokers review has compared IB with other brokerages and without a doubt, Interactive Brokers is the best day trading platform for access to different markets. Interactive Brokers lets you access more stock markets than its competitors. This includes major stock markets like the NASDAQ, the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) or the London Stock Exchange (LSE), but also minor ones such as the Warsaw Stock Exchange in Poland or the Mexican markets. Other than regular stocks, penny stocks are also available. Besides stocks, you can also trade with more than 13,000 ETFs at IB.

Not a broker

Not a broker

Market Data and Software Costs

Interactive Brokers

TradeStation

AmiBroker

eSignal

NinjaTrader

Tastyworks

Trading Technologies

Data Feeds Compatible

Data Sources

Interactive Brokers, Rithmic, Dorman Trading, Gain Capital, AMP, Global Futures etc… See full list

All supported Data Feeds: Kinetick is the “preferred Market Data Service” according to NinjaTrader

Tastyworks uses dxFeed for their market data, which doesn't have any delay. Tastyworks is closed source software that has very few supported APIs. This is a big drawback of Tastyworks, as you have less choice regarding data feeds.

Trading Technologies supplies market data for over 40 exchanges and execution venues. Users can connect FIX applications if they wish to use FIX market data.

Or, custom solutions are possible through developing API applications that can be normalized between exchanges. Trading Technologies does offer the potential to avoid market data subscriptions, but they can be easily integrated if the user wants to use a third party.

Minimum account opening balance

IBKR Pro: $0 (+ up to $10 maint fee depending on level of activity, free if commisions greater than $10) IBKR Lite: $0

TS Select: $2000 TS Go: $1

N/A

N/A

$400

$0 for cash accounts, $2,000 for margin accounts

N/A

Time to open account

Time to open Interactive Brokers account: 1-3 days

Time to open TradeStation account: 1-3 days

N/A

N/A

Time to open NinjaTrader account: 1 - 2 days

Opening an account is a fast process, and you can be up-and-running on the same day. There’s a 30-day free trial, making the process very welcoming and accessible. However, many reviews on the Play Store (app) claim difficulties logging in and opening an account suggesting slow logins and bugs. Tested today, the verification email did not arrive immediately.

Inactivity fee

IBKR Pro: up to $10 fee depending on level of activity, free if commissions are greater than $10 IBKR Lite: $0

$50 per year

N/A

N/A

$25

No inactivity fees, meaning you’re not forced to use your account to avoid being charged

N/A

Withdrawal Fee

$0

From $25

N/A

N/A

Withdrawing via Wire Transfer: Domestic Wire: $30 International Wire: 40 EUR for EUR transfers, $40 for all other Withdrawing via check: Dorman Trading: Free Phillip Capital: $4

$25 for US traders and $45 for non-US users

N/A

Desktop

Free

Free except for TS GO where trading surcharges apply

Single-user licenses (can use single license on multiple computers) Standard Edition: $279 Professional Edition: $339 Ultimate Pack Pro: $499 (includes AmiQuote and AFL Code Wizard) Optional Extras: "AmiQuote" universal quote downloader +$99 "AFL Code Wizard" +$99 Source

"Classic" $54/month or $540/year "Signature" $176/month or $1594/year "Elite" $359/month or $3480/year

There are 3 licenses: Free, Lease, Own Free: $0 Lease: $720 annually, $425 semi-annually or $225 Quarterly

Own: Single payment of $1099 or 4 monthly payments of $329

Free

Standart: $700/month (subscription) or $50/month with $1,000 CAP (Transactional)

Pro: $1,400/month (subscription) or $400/month with $1,800 CAP

Mobile App

Free

Free

Don't have mobile app

Available with "Signature" or "Elite" package only

N/A

Free

Web Trading

Free

Free

N/A

N/A

N/A

Free

Stocks & ETFs

Tiered: pricing dependent on volume: from $0.0035 - $0.0005 per share Fixed: $0.005 per share (min. $1 per order

TS Select: $0 TS Go: $0

N/A

N/A

N/A

Free

Stock Options

Tiered: pricing dependent on volume: from $0.25 - $0.15 per share

TS Select: $0.60 per contract TS Go: $0.50 per contract

N/A

N/A

N/A

Futures

$0.85

TS Select: $1.50 per contract TS Go: $0.85 per contract Historical Tick data: 6 months of tick date for @ES

N/A

N/A

Order routing: Continuum: $0.15 per contract (default) Rithmic: $0.25 per contract SuperDOM: Dynamic: $0.00 per contract (default) Static: $0.10 per contract Trading Technologies licensing fee CQG Desktop: $0.25 per futures contract

Opening commission: $1.25 per contract; Closing commission: $1.25 per contract

Futures Micro E-mini

Tiered - pricing dependent on volume: from $0.15 - $0.05 per share

TS Select: $0.50 per contract TS Go: $0.50 per contract

N/A

N/A

Free Platform: $0.35 per Micro Contract

Leased Platform: $0.25 per Micro Contract

Lifetime License: $0.09 per Micro Contract

Futures Options

$0.85

TS Select: $1.50 per contract TS Go: $1.50 per contract

Order routing: Continuum: $0.40 per contract

Opening commission: $2.50 per contract; Closing commission: $0

Images

User Interface and Technology

Interactive Brokers

TradeStation

AmiBroker

eSignal

NinjaTrader

Tastyworks

Trading Technologies

Charting, Indicators and Tools

IB Charting: IB charting is free and they offer a wide range of charting features, including 120 technical indicators. Nonetheless, the charting tool is not user-friendly.

Note that TWS actually has two interfaces: Mosaic and Classic. Look at the bottom-left for tabs to switch views. - Mosaic is relatively new and allows you to create a custom view of your terminal with the lock button in the upper right. - Classic is old-school and doesn't have the bells and whistles of Mosaic, but is more transparent for many features.

Many users complain about IB charting, therefore it is recommended to use a 3rd party charting platform that can easily connect to IB to place orders. If you intend to use TWS for chart trading or any type of complex technical analysis then we don't recommend this. Their charting is basic, historical data is fine & accurate, but don't count on more than that. 

TradeStation Charting:TradeStation charting is very simple and practical. On both the browser-based platform and desktop application focuses on keeping things simple. We find the layout designs are clean and practical. Web trading is well designed, and chart trading functionality is superior to many other brokers. In the previous TradeStation review, we've compared this trading platform with NinjaTrader and MultiCharts. However, TradeStation fell a bit behind on the charting spectrum and let MultiCharts win.

At Quant Savvy we load our systems into TradeStation automated software, where systems generate trading orders automatically which are then transmitted in real-time to your broker.

Indicators: There are 274 indicators/studies available with Tradestation. Clients can also share and sell their indicators via TradeStation TradingApp Store, many products are free, but others can range between $50 per month to $200 per month. There is at this time over 1000 products available on TradeStation app store. 

AmiBroker Charting: Ability to quickly and easily add a wide variety of technical analyses to the charts, switch between multiple timescales, and completely customize the appearance of your charts as needed.

Indicators: All classic indicators included: Hundreds of well-known indicators such as: ROC, RSI, MACD, OBV, CCI, MFI, NVI, Stochastics, Ultimate oscillator, DMI, ADX, Parabolic SAR, TRIN, Advance/Decline line, Accumulation/Distribution, TRIX, Chaikin oscillator and many more

The whole platform including charting and indicators is very dated and not polished.

eSignal Charting: E-Signal offers a wide variety of charting intervals, including time (seconds, minutes, days, years, etc.), volume, range, tick. Many charting options outside traditional candlestick and bar charts: Heiken Ashi, Bar, Candle, Point & Figure, Histogram, Line, Area, Kagi, Renko, Price Break. A technical analyst will love the pristine look of Esignal desktop with its extensive drawing tools and user-friendly navigation.

Esignal is stable, fast and has comprehensive technical tools, they even a great add on for Market Profile (which comes at extra cost). See; Esignal 12.1 In Action Video. 

Esignal DDE Q Link which allows you to download real-time data, however, the last update was in 2014!

NinjaTrader Charting: Ninja Trading is free to use for advanced charting, trade simulation and backtesting. NinjaTrader has won awards for its charting capabilities, with numerous default chart styles, indicators, and drawing tools. Order Flow+ is an amalgamation of 8 premium features that offers 8 tools when charting. These are:

● Order Flow Volume Profile Indicator ● Volumetric Bars ● Order Flow Trade Detector ● Market Depth Map ● Order flow Cumulative Data ● Order Flow VWAP with Deviation

NinjaTrader Indicators: NinjaTrader fully embraces 3rd party add-ons, meaning there are literally 1000s to browse. Many of these include indicators. Here’s a list of over 400.

Tastyworks charting: Experienced traders will find the user interface a pleasure to work with. Charting and the general experience of the software (and web and mobile app) is intuitive and very smooth. Charting indicators include Average Directional Index, Bollinger bands, Moving average convergence divergence and relative strength index. There’s a chart drawing tool to add drawings such as trend lines. Bare in mind, this is directed towards options trading. You can make quick informed decisions when options trading because this is who it’s for. There’s a tonne of great options charting features, with an analysis page that displays charting on positions. You can assess the risk profiles of multiple open positions, and thus see how adjusting one position will affect it. ChartGrid has recently been added on the desktop application, which allows the user to load 10 underlyings on a given page. When equities trading however, things aren’t quite so smooth. All that exists is prices and input orders, meaning there’s very limited apparatus to perform advanced analysis.

Trading Technologies Charting: Charting has always been a downside of Trading Technologies, but they're slowly improving their arsenal of indicators and charting capabilities.

The charting is fully integrated into the platform, from Desktop to Mobile, where you can make use of spread charts and chart trading.

E*Trade is fantastic for beginner traders because of the tools available, along with UX/UI. In particular, options trading is made extremely accessible. For example, when using the Snapshot Analysis tool, the key events to keep an eye on are listed along the P&L chart, and the risk/reward is denoted in smiley faces - it doesn’t get much more user friendly.

Futures trading is also great with E*Trade, particularly with the use of the Quick Trade widget, which triggers orders with ease, as well as having many futures ladders than can be run at once.

E*trade Charting: Chart IQ powers the Power E*Trade platform, which is a 3rd party HTML 5 chart provider. Panning and zoom is liquid smooth, and there are 119 technical indicators, with 32 drawing tools. Recognia technical analysis is also integrated.

Platform Reviews by Users

"IB is quite good with decent TWS and importantly their fills and commissions are top tier vrs the competition. Also any charges for data feed are offset if you make minimum, i think 10, trades a month."  

Source 2017

“Nobody runs IBTWS without a separate charting and analytics platform. The option analytics are comically bad. Run a stress and it defaults to 3 sigmas and all you'll see is your risk curve as a flat line.”

Source 2019

“ I do have a lot of problems with IB’s data feed and practically spending most of my time (sometimes hours per day) waiting for chart/data to show up. This is mainly for options data, for example wanting to chart the pricing of a butterfly combo/spread over couple weeks at mid prices. I chart various option combos all the time, and each time I wait 1-15 minutes for chart to show up, which is insane and makes it unusable.”

Source 2019

"As you well know, TWS charting is a total nightmare. In a few words, its faulty, clumsy, and heavy. Not saying you can't use it (I do), but it's full of problems. Some of them are horrible, especially for what I need it to do. I love the IB API though."

Source 2020

"TradeStation has really great charting, indicators, a language of its own, and reasonably decent fills... but also has sucky tech support/poorly-informed trade desk staff and abysmal software quality, so crashes and freeze-ups are common."

Source 2020

"Advantage of AmiBroker. It is faster, light wight, almost no bugs, almost no limits and cheaper."

Source 2020

"eSignal continues to be a mainstay analysis platform for all that I do in the markets. From alerts to great scanning the platform meets my heavy technical needs and is Integrated with my broker! I never need to leave it and can act right away on my ideas. It is worth the price as I have found that you get what you pay for typically."

Source 2020

“I find that NinjaTrader has a similar interface to MultiCharts, the wide support of indicators that TradeStation offers, and the simplicity of thinkorswim. Ninja still has a learning curve, as does any platform. I wish they supported more brokers, but now that they're in the business, I think that probably won't happen. I've had good experiences with Ninja Brokerage so far, but I'd like more options just in case. I like that I was able to get to try Ninja without any obligations at first. This made it easier to switch over. Anyway, I use Ninja as my primary platform now, as it supports a few systems I like to use. I am looking forward to version 8 but staying away for now until they get all the bugs ironed out.”

 Source 2018

“I do prefer TradingView, eSignal and TradeStation, but that's not taking much away from the fact that NinjaTrader is still a fantastic platform with plenty to offer. Users will appreciate how easy it is to connect to virtually any datafeed/broker, and the speed of the platform and navigating is top-notch. The only thing I found to be slow was when using the Market Analyzer to run scans, which slowed down my system a lot when using 100+ symbols.”

Source 2018

"They have Good research tools but No demo account with Deposit and withdrawal options limited. If you've invested already but no withdrawal granted, its not a problem."

“One click trading! No confirmation required means a significant efficiency gain. Also, it is possible to deploy multiple algos with TT."

"Charting is horrible. Only recently did they implement cont contracts but they don't even have volume-based rollover."

"I'm very pleased with E*Trade. I've been with them since 1999. E*Trade has a lot of good tools for analyzing, and I like their excellent charts for account Performance & value to see how one has done. I'm a simple minded investor, so don't use all their fancy tools, but I strictly go for longer term value."

"I absolutely love this platform. It's much more in depth than many others I've used. The quotes are in real time and extremely accurate and trades are executed immediately. I love it."

"I used to be a big advocate of Etrade. They have a great interface (the site is easy to use), and it gives the individual investor access to a lot of tools. However, in the past year or so I have become aware that my trades are not routed to the most efficient exchanges, but are instead sold to HFT's so they can pinch a few pennies off of each trade in the dark pools. The net result is that individual investors (trade customers!) have ultimately been sold out."

Images

Winner: eSignal

_{Ranking Methodology: For data trader’s high-quality charts are essential as well as the ability to place orders quickly and directly via charts.  Traders requires wide-ranging indicators, premium app and indicator packages. Require heavy customisation. How well does the platform handle multiple desktops, charts and indicators without lag.}

eSignal still ranks amongst some of the best day trading platforms purely for technical analysis and charting. It is stable and smooth and charts offer flexible scaling which adjusts automatically as we scroll past data. 

Surprisingly, even with the lack of updates eSignal still looks well designed and the user interface is intuitive. It has loads of indicators and customizable features to adjust every design color, text, font for pedantic users.

eSignal is an advanced charting platform fundamentally targeting active traders technical analysis traders. If your goal is to have well designed, stable and smooth charts from which you can add any indicator you desire then eSignal is still a great option.

Day Trading Platform Tools, Live Trading, Research and Portfolio Risk Software

Interactive Brokers

TradeStation

AmiBroker

eSignal

NinjaTrader

Tastyworks

Trading Technologies

Scanners, Screeners, Watch Lists, Software tools, Alerts

Options Strategy Lab: Allows investors more depth into the structure of option pricing and develop option combinations tailored to their views. The Option Strategy Lab allows the client to make price and volatility forecasts over time. Options Strategy Lab may be used in conjunction to the IB Probability Lab - which can be used to show what option premiums are predicting about future prospects for share prices of the underlying. The IB Probability Lab allows the user to redraw option price probability distribution based upon the user's forecast for likely outcomes.

Market Scanner: Scan multiple products around the world. Create custom scans - Variables, filters and parameters allow you to create unique, completely customized scans. For example, you may want to find the top ten most active US stocks with a price of USD 30.00 or lower, but only in the Real Estate industry. Scan parameters: High Dividend Yield, Top % Gainers and Losers, Most Active, Hot by Price and Volume, Top Trade Rate, Highest and Lowest Option Implied Volatility, 13-, 26- and 52-week High and Low, and many more.

Watch lists: can include anything from equities to individual options contracts, futures, forex, warrants – you name it. A staggering 494 data points are available for column customization.

OptionStation Pro: toolset allows you to build, evaluate, and track just about any options strategy you can think of. Tools are geared to active traders, such as time and sales, market depth, and snapshots that show how your positions are performing.

Radar Screen: Continuously monitors and ranks up to 1,00 symbols in real-time, based on more than 180 fully customizable technical and fundamental indicators, as well as virtually unlimited amounts of custom criteria, through Easy Language (link to the programming language subsection).

3rd Party Data: Plot 3rd party data in a Chart Analysis or RadarScreen window from previously created ASCII or MetaStock (9.x or greater) data files. This allows you to use proprietary data that may have been generated through another application (such as Excel) or that was obtained for exotic markets not currently supported by the TradeStation Data Network.

Trading Apps: Choose from 100s of products which can be downloaded directly to the Tradestation platform offering full compatibility. Options include ffron end order entry apps or uniques indicators or even fully automated trading strategy.

AmiBroker Scanning and backtesting are impressively fast in AmiBroker – a simple scan takes less than a second on a single CPU.

AmiBroker Exploration: exploration works in a similar way to scan but instead of looking for and reporting just buy/sell signals it allows you to generate customizable screening (or exploration) report that can give you much more information than simple scan. So, for example, the following formula will accept all symbols with closing prices greater than 50 : filter = close > 50; Exploration mode allows you to create and then export a report with completely customizable columns. Exploration allows Scatter charts to display relationships between many symbols such as correlation, risk, etc. They can be seen as replacement and upgrade to "Risk/yield" map that was hard coded to just one function. Now you can code your own X-Y charts that are not limited to just risk/yield maps.

AmiBroker Scan: monitor the occurrence of trading signals, chart patterns and other market conditions. This can be done in Analysis module with Scan or Exploration features. Scan performs search for at least one of Buy, Sell, Short, Cover signals and displays predefined set of columns. See some more information on scans and Amibroker multithreading capabilities: Click here

eSignal Screener: Scan over 50 fundamental data fields and 25 built-in technical analysis indicators. Market Screener Plus is built-in stock scanner allows users to create their own rules. Trading View’s screener provides users a set of filters and a way to interact with each one. When it comes to making filters interact with each other, they are very limited.

Advanced GET Scanner: The Scanner searches the markets in real time for stocks poised to move. Find award-winning strategies such as Type 1 buys, XTL Breakouts or Type 2 sells in seconds. Cost: $495/Year

Market Profile: Esignal has the best market profile tool but costs $55/month as an addon. Market Profile is a unique charting tool that enables traders to observe the two-way auction process that drives all market movement—the ebb and flow of price over time — in a way that reveals patterns in herd behavior. Put another way, the Profile is simply a constantly developing bell curve which is built with Price, Time and Volume.

Market Analyzer: Allows real-time market scanning via a high powered quote sheet. Here, it’s easy to monitor trade opportunities with a highly customizable instrument list. Technical indicator columns can be added on too, creating a dashboard feel.

Nison Candle Scanner: Allows you to accurately pick out correct candle patterns. This helps traders save hours of time in their research, as it instantly helps spot candlestick patterns.

Wave Volume Multi Time Frame Scanner: This is a great addon when working with the NinjaTrader Analyzer, as it includes 10 chart patterns and alerts for customizable instruments.

A full list of 3rd party scanners can be found here.

Trading Technologies has a great user interface in which many widgets are available. The watchlist widget allows you to see the contract, pos, last, bid/ask, vol and many more data points. The Strategy Creation widget allows the user to create a watchlist based on their strategy. It submits the strategy to the exchange and then it can be watched in your workspace.

Power E*trade: Power E*Trade provides a wider variety of features compared to standard, which includes price alerts and charting tools. Much of the scanners (i.e. Recognia scanner) allows users to set alerts when technical criteria is met.

Watchlists, as you would expect, are integrated into every E*Trade platform.

Screeners & scanners: Flexible screeners for ETFs, stocks, mutual funds and fixed income are available. On standard E*Trade, the stock screener is customizable, with around 45 different criteria. On Power E*Trade, there is a LiveAction scanner with over 100 screens. These are real-time scans on the market with live metrics (volatility, Greeks, fundamentals and so on).

During Easter 2020, E*Trade added thematic investing screeners. Included in the 17 additions was Up and Comers, Playing Defense and Hedging With Gold.

The ETF screener has 16 strategies to get users started, and the Options screener on Power E*Trade’s LIve Action tool is very powerful, being able to scan unusual options activity.

Placing Live Trades and Trading Technology

Placing Live Trades with Interactive Brokers is nice and easy. IB supports several trading platforms that can be accessed from desktop, using WebTrader and TWS, or mobile devices.

Book Trader: Lets you create, modify, and transmit orders for a single instrument within the book price ladder.

Interactive Brokers' Pro pricing system: order execution engine that stays on top of changes in market conditions to re-route all or parts of your order to achieve optimal execution, attain price improvement, and maximize any possible rebate. For multi-leg options orders, the router seeks out the best place to execute each leg of a spread, or clients can choose to route for rebates. Clients can choose a particular venue to execute an order from TWS.

Matrix: Combined benefits of a detailed market depth window, a highly advanced order-entry tool, and precise order-tracking systems. The Matrix is the fastest way to enter or change an order, with a single click and/or drag and drop simplicity.

TradeStation's smart order router: elements of both spray and sequential order routing methodologies, depending on the order placed and market conditions at the time. Order logic seeks out and captures as much price improvement and hidden size as reasonably possible within a reasonable period of time.

No DOM (depth of market): AmiBroker can be a superior automated software, but it's seriously lacking as a full trading program. There is no DOM and thight might be because DOM requires maintenance between DOM and API for various brokers rests on the developers. It's also limited by having to use expensive market data options if one is not using Interactive Brokers.

Chart Trading: AmiBroker does not allow easily adding trendlines or support/resistance lines which can be automated as an order. You must create an ATF script for this functionality. You can use place order dialog box which will bring up a order ticket - this makes it kind of pointless to try to live chart trade directly from AmiBroker charts. Live trading requries automated scripts and that is what AmiBroker is designed for.

Trade Manager: you can trade directly from your chart and manager orders quickly with the eSignal Trade Manager. With eSignal 12 the Trade Manager was significantly improved, it has DOM display and you can add trailing stops, scaling out of positions, multi-level stops, etc. We do like that you can change all colors for every column and cell.

Money Management Planner: This is a combination of eSignal Trade Manager and Chart trading - users can add automated money management strategies to an opened position, you can add exit strategies or stops strategies. 

Chart Trading: Conveniently place a trade from the chart.

Chart trading feature does not work with eSignal OnDemand Subscription

ChartTrader: NinjaTrader allows you to trade directly from your charts. Order submission can be completed with pre-configured Quick Buttons, or with a Right-Click menu.

There is clear, color-orientated order management, which denotes type and quantity. The click-then-click technology allows for adjusting orders as you go with high precision.

NinjaTrader’s order entry options are extremely well designed, too. The visualization of SuperDOM and Chart Trader means mistakes are less likely to occur, and entry is very fast. These allow for multi-stage exit parameters, an auto-trail stop as well as a checkbox for an auto-breakeven stop.

Placing trades: In Tastyworks review we’ve alluded to the fact you may need to research your trades elsewhere, but executing the trades themselves on Tastyworks is fast and functional. You will want to use the desktop version though if fast data streams are important to your strategy. You can’t send stage orders or multiple orders for later entry, but you can display open positions in charts and adjust them. Very recently, the functionality of trading from a chart has been improved with the Chart Grid feature. There are a number of trading strategies and order types, such as straddle, iron condor, strangle, limit, stop market, stop limit, GTD, GTC and more.

Placing trades: Placing trades is intuitive and fast with Trading Technologies. Order parameters include Basis, Best Limit, Cross, Fill and Save, Iceberg, Limit, Market Limit, Stop Limit, OCO and many others.

Placing an order is very straightforward with E*Trade, and includes a Trade Ticket which can be saved for later.

The options order ticket also allows users to simulate placing options orders which can then see how it affects their accounts, prior to the real execution of the trade.

Portfolio, Risk Management and Software Tools

Volatility Lab: Interactive Brokers volatility lab provides snapshot of past and future readings for volatility on a stock, its industry peers and some measure of the broad market. Historic volatility measures the degree to which a security has moved over a period of time. In turn, the option market implies the expected volatility based upon the security's prior movements and in the face of both anticipated unknown events such as earnings announcements and the movement of the broad market as well.

Risk Navigator: Risk NavigatorSM is a real-time market-risk management platform that provides a comprehensive measure of risk exposure across multiple asset classes around the globe. Assess specific risk slices of your portfolio, such as risk by position, risk by underlying, and risk by industry. Equity Portfolio Managers can use the Risk Navigator's advanced beta analysis to build their portfolios based on key concepts of the Capital Asset Pricing Model.

Trade Manager: this is the only portfolio tool and it displays trade and account activity. All orders are logged to the TradeManager window on a real-time basis when TradeStation is open. Orders are color-coded so you can differentiate between different order statuses at a glance. The colors are updated in real-time as the status of your orders changes. You can also quickly close positions and cancel orders from the TradeManager window, as well as view your order history.

True Portfolio-Level Backtesting: Test your trading system on multiple securities using realistic account constraints and common portfolio equity. Trade portfolios to decrease risk/reward ratio. Find out how changing the number of simultaneous positions and using different money management affects your trading system performance.

Dynamic portfolio-level position sizing: Use current portfolio equity (sum of cash and all simultaneously opened positions value) to calculate new trade size, or use any other position sizing method by specifying dollar value or number of contracts/shares. Position size can be constant or changing trade-by-trade.

eSignal Portfolio Window: This is built into the Watch List Window and you can track the current value of your investment portfolio. This is a very limited tool because you have to manually adjust the cash value of a position and from time to time you need to update the portfolio position manually to correct the number of contracts or shares or the price per share or contract - certainly not designed with clients with extensive portfolios or open positions.

NinjaTrader Risk Management Assistant: The NinjaTrader alarm manager will carry out automated actions such as managing positions, Telegram Bot Broadcasts, send emails and execute voice alerts. There are some general and free inherent risk functions inside the tools tab on the ribbon, too. These mostly center around creating risk templates, such as setting intraday margin requirements.

There are also plenty of 3rd party risk-related addons, which can be viewed here.

There are many features that are conducive to risk management on Trading Technologies. Firstly, users are able to combine order activity across all execution platforms. This means you can get the bigger picture using the order book for an overview of all positions and orders. Prices can be configured so algos and traders do not submit undesirable orders. Other Trading Technologies features include pre-trade risk checks, order cross prevention, post-trade risk and portfolio analysis. There’s a risk matrix available that allows the user to assess multiple scenarios at the same time for changes to price and volatility.

Portfolio and fee reports are extremely clear with E*Trade. They can be customized up to 100 columns, such as dividend, Net Asset Value and so on.

Power E*Trade can be used to view your asset allocation and overall portfolio risk. If you have multiple accounts, they can be viewed as a grouped portfolio. The website platform provides an Estimate Income amount for future cash flow, which includes bond interest, dividends and so on. The biggest flaw here is that you can’t consolidate external assets held with other institutions/platforms.

Core Portfolios: For an annual fee of 0.30%, E*Trades robo-advisor service will diversify and manage your portfolio. There’s a minimum investment of $500 for this service.

Research and News Feeds

Fundamentals Explorer: In late 2019, Interactive Brokers rolled out Fundamentals Explorer as a new tool within Client Portal, built for everyday investors to perform traditional fundamental research on stocks. It's light years ahead of anything Interactive Brokers had prior (the data is also incorporated into the mobile app under quotes). Fundamentals Explorer will eventually make its way into TWS, and the foundation has been laid for adding ETFs alongside Mutual Funds research. Overall, customers should expect to see improvements throughout 2020.

PortfolioAnalyst: Stepping away from traditional research, PortfolioAnalyst provides traders hedge fund-level reporting on their portfolio's performance and makeup. Interactive Brokers also offers a free version for non-clients where you can link all your individual accounts and run reporting. It isn't as insightful and easy to use as, say, Personal Capital. Still, it's a compelling tool for traders with assets spread across numerous institutions.

News: Interactive Brokers has its own news domain called Traders' Insight. It also provides integrated third-party news and recommendations to its desktop platform. Performing even basic research on stocks, ETFs, and mutual funds is nothing like a traditional full-service brokerage experience one might find at TD Ameritrade, Charles Schwab, or Fidelity. You have to learn how to navigate TWS to find the information you want; there are no streamlined views. Bottom line, while TWS checks off quite a few boxes for research, the user experience is poor.

The Investors' Marketplace lets individual traders and investors, institutions and third-party service providers meet and do business together. This is a great resource where you can find investment advisors, brokers, hedge funds. There is programming consultants, software vendors. They even have list of accounting firms, administrators, auditing firms, compliance firms, legal firms, tax firms. Educations research such as trading publications, education and coaches etc.. Source

News feed: Offers Market Insights, the news is categorized based on the products and sectors. On the trading platforms, you can filter the news based on several categories, channels, and you can also search for a symbol. • TradeStation is not built for performing in-depth company research. • No traditional fundamental research for stocks • No mutual funds or fixed income research • Nearly non-existent ETFs research experience.

Tradestation Market Insights: Provides news and up to date commentary on the markets.

Tradestation Research: App built directly into the website is very dated but provides some info on symbols you want to track, still very limited on what can be achieved.

Web Research Window: Web Research window allows you to view on-line news, research, profiles, statistics and all kind of information related to currently selected symbol. The whole thing is very dated and barely usable. AmiBroker is not a fundamentals research tool. 

3rd Party News Feeds: With AmiBroker you do have some compatible plugins such as MarketCast and Tenfore real time news feed. These are both very cumbersome to install and you need to install them as plugins and then apply various settings to get them to work. To be honest we would not bother using AmiBroker for any news or research as the alternatives are far superior.

Fundamentals Data: Comprehensive North American fundamental content, including a company snapshot, quarterly financials, ratios, consensus estimates, and ownership provided by Factset Research. Cost: $8/month.

eSignal News and Research: Bundled package for popular vendors $15/month

Newswire: PR Newswire has been a leading distributor of corporate, association and institutional information to the media and the financial community. PR Newswire carries full-text media releases for more than 17,000 U.S. companies.

Business Wire: Used by thousands of public relations and investor relations professionals to disseminate news releases, photos, multimedia, regulatory filings and other information. News release subjects include breaking news, earnings results, product announcements, mergers and acquisitions, public policy, legal issues, webcasts, press conference advisories and more.

IPO Calendar: The first in a series of event-driven services to be offered in the eSignal News and Research package. It displays, in calendar rather than "diary" format, Initial Public Offering information on companies going public on U.S. stock exchanges.

NinjaTrader Market Updates and Trade Desk Calendar: These two streams of news are provided directly by NinjaTrader to help with fundamental analysis. A word of warning though: they’re not frequent posters. Only around 3 stories per month get posted.

Kinetick News Feed: Kinetick provides real-time news from PR Newswire & Business Wire, as well as RTT News. Of course, Kinetick also provides 500+ market metrics, minute and daily data, historical tick and over 17 fields of fundamental data. 

RSS Feed: You can use custom code to implement a trading strategy that automates trades according to news stories.

Fundamental Data: Tastyworks is very limited when it comes to fundamental data, which is essentially non-existent on the platform. This means research and data is limited only to technical stuff. However, there is a fantastic educational platform packed full of content and even live trading streams. Here, you can not only learn strategies but also hear some relevant news. There is also streaming of news from Acquire media on the quote sidebar. There are also dates of upcoming earnings reports for different companies, which is very helpful.

No Fundamental Data: When charting, historical prices are available from up to 10 years ago. However, there is no fundamental data available and Trading Technologies lacks research capabilities. There are many great streams of data, but they’re mostly current data, such as anonymized order data in real-time. Trading Technologies doesn’t have a news feed feature, so you’re reliant on third parties for any fundamental analysis.

Winner: Interactive Brokers

_{Ranking Methodology: Many non technical traders rely on in depth fundamental analysis, this would be a major ranking factor. For larger traders or money managers they will need software to manage their overall portfolio risk - this is essential especially in volatile market conditions.} 

In this Interactive Brokers review, it might be considered as one of the best day trading platforms for traders who are looking for a wide range of trading tools. The other platforms compared in this review are not designed for fundamental analysis and research, eSignal and AmiBroker are designed predominantly as charting and testing platforms. Interactive Brokers has a whole wealth of tools to perform in depth research on companies and markets, the release of Fundamental Explorer in 2019 is light years ahead of nearly all other Online Broker and Day Trading Platforms. The Investors' Marketplace is fantastic resource for any trader, hedge fund or professional - listed services from legal and compliance makes it very easy for bigger clients to manage their accounts.

Mobile App

Interactive Brokers

TradeStation

AmiBroker

eSignal

NinjaTrader

Tastyworks

Trading Technologies

Mobile App Rating

Apple Store Rating: 2.9 Android Rating: 3.4

Apple Store Rating: 4.6 Android Rating: 4.2

Apple Store Rating: no app Android Rating: no app

Apple Store Rating: 2.7 Android Rating: 2.4

Apple Store Rating: no app Android Rating: no app

Apple Store Rating: 5  Android Rating: 4.2 *Apple Store has only 2 reviews

Apple Store Rating: 4.4 Android Rating: 3.6

Mobile Trading

Functionality: Mobile trading with Interactive Brokers is well supported across all devices. From lightning-quick streaming data to full-featured order entry and portfolio management, Interactive Brokers includes everything professionals require to go trade on the go. IBKR Mobile, Interactive Brokers's mobile trading platform, is available both for iOS and Android.

Charting: Charting is robust, including 70 optional indicators and easy customizations; however, panning isn't as smooth as newer HTML5 charting applications. Additionally, some features one would expect are not included, such as stock and/or index comparisons. Negatives include that stock alerts cannot be delivered via push notification. Instead, alerts are delivered via email.

Funtionality: TradeStation’s mobile app offers a full day trading functionality, thanks to Matrix (ladder trading) and complex options trading support. Note: Matrix requires Level II market data, which is available for an additional $11 per month.

Charting: TradeStation mobile is robust, clean, and includes everything a demanding trader could want: full chart type and date range flexibility, after-hours visibility, active and filled order visibility, and 43 optional indicators, to name a few. Even drawing tools are available so you can draw anything from trend lines to Fibonacci retracements on charts.

QuoTrek Mobile: Streaming quotes, charts and news from the world's markets on your smartphone, so you're always in touch with the markets in real time for $35/month.

Watch list syncing: While mobile watch lists automatically sync with the Web Trading platform, they do not sync with the TradeStation desktop platform.

N/A

Funtionality: e-Signal mobile app that provides access to user’s watch lists, chart, company information, etc.

Charting: Detailed Quotes – Quote grid with instrument type-specific configurations and the ability to customize the grid with hundreds of data points. Robust streaming interactive charts with overlays, comparison studies, and a wide variety of chart aggregations and timeframes.

It is a susbcription service a whoping $179 per month!

NinjaTrader Brokerage users have the ability to access their accounts through the CQG Mobile app.

Functionality: The mobile app is pretty functional and doesn’t contain many bugs, although the user experience isn’t great. For example, the font cannot be resized, the app is locked in portrait, and becomes quite hard to navigate when you have multiple spread positions. Functionality isn’t quite as good as desktop, as it lacks the news feed and charting functionalities (i.e. ChartGrid) that desktop has. Overall though, you can perform fast trades with real-time data, as well as view the social feed and current positions. Executing trades is very clean and simple too.

Functionality: Mobile trading often raises concerns around speed, but Trading Technologies’ colocated servers allow for low-latency trades wherever you are on mobile. You can manage your algos using ADL, place and manage orders, view market data, use the auto spreader and benefit from collocated execution. This means that chart trading is possible, as well as managing your trading algorithmic strategy. Furthermore, there’s real-time data and a portfolio view.

Functionality: Functionality is fairly impressive on the mobile platform, being both intuitive and powerful. News is accessible, with Bloomberg TV being streamable, as well as a daily webinar. Security is strong, with face or fingerprint recognition being available. Customer service can be accessed on the app via chat.

Charting: The analytical power for a mobile app is impressive at E*Trade. On the mobile app, the E*Trader screener has 15 criteria. Charting is easy to use on mobile, with the user interface being intuitive and slick. The app mirrors the web platform fairly accurately, so there’s little left to be desired.

Mobile App Reviews

"This App is full of extensive info, but is still “half-baked”. What a struggle to navigate around just to find one’s trading history!! It takes multiple steps!!"

Source 2020

"This is a good app just needs to be more user friendly. But when it comes down to how it works. It's a pretty amazing app."

Source 2020

"Really happy with the platform. Very user friendly."

Source 2020

"Not only TradeStation the most user-friendly platformn for professional traders, it constantly is upgraded and improved. The app version is simply fantastic because it gives the user all the information and tools needed to trade fast when opportunities arise on the go."

Source 2020

N/A

"I have downloaded the software can anyone tell me where the sign up link is. They don't appear to have added it anywhere?"

Source 2018

"Fake. No sign up feature. Then why for?"

Source 2019

"App Sucks, you can't create a login."

Source 2020

"Only gives option to sign in. No sign up. Useless."

Source 2018

N/A

"I like the app and find it useful to place and monitor trades. The charts are so basic that they are useless in my opinion. Add better charts and get the missing star. It would also be nice to see the expected move on the option chain. However, the app is much better than in the past."

"Unable to save intruments (ES, ZN, CL) on the market list section. Once you log off and log back in all your instruments will be removed. It will revert back to the Default blank market list with the "+" symbol in the middle where your are instructed to add new instruments. The feature ultimately becomes useless."

"I'd like to start this review by pointing out its a beautiful looking app. The platform overall is second to none for commodity traders. My biggest gripes with the Android and iOS versions... No alerts for when a price point is hit? I can't logged into the desktop app and phone app simultanously?"

"Love the app for growing my IRA, lots of references for new investors and most trades are FREE!!" "Love this app! Makes trading so EASY!! Everything at your fingertips, gotta love it. Not a whole bunch of bells, whistles; everything an experienced (not professional!) trader would need."

"This interface is in serious need of an upgrade. I've been using this for over 5 years and haven't seen any significant improvements to make the app more user friendly. Navigating the layout is frustrating when scrolling horizontally doesn't work. If not associated with my employer's stock plan I wouldn't even use this app."

Images

N/A

N/A

Winner: TradeStation

_{Methodology: Day traders need an intuitive trading platform on the go. Ability to monitor markets with real time quotes, charts and scanners are essential quality apps. Do we get alerts and push notifications for stops, targets or can we set custom alerts? How easy can we place trades including complex order types? What is the account functionality of the app – can we add and withdraw funds.}

You can quickly access quotes, hotlists, and order matrix. The design is good and transitions from viewing your portfolio to sending orders are very easy due to the well-designed interface. It is possible to analyze and trade options spread with strikes and expirations and volume for markets. You can analyze charts with indicators and unlike the IB app which performs this task poorly Tradestation, everything looks clean and clear.

No app

No app

Programming Language

Interactive Brokers

TradeStation

AmiBroker

eSignal

NinjaTrader

Tastyworks

Trading Technologies

Language

Interactive Brokers API has official binding for several programming languages: C#, .Net, Java, C++, VB and Python.

Clients can build their own trading applications, obtain market and chart data and view IBKR account detail using API solutions.

Ease of Use: Offers sample application for less experienced programmers: they can develop and hone their applications using Excel before migrating to a more robust language. Ability to link your system to their TWS demo for testing.

IBKR API Software: IB API solution supports a number of languages, including Java, .NET (C#), C++, Python, ActiveX or DDE. We also let you use a demo account to back-test your setup and test trade ideas before going live. Java – Most popular API technology; C++ (POSIX-compliant); Python; .NET (C#) - You can use the C# library with any .NET supported language; C++ (MFC); ActiveX – Integrate our ActiveX control into other programs such as Excel and Matlab; DDE – Use our Excel sample application to get you started, or any DDE-aware program. Source Interactive Brokers API Setup Guide Github Link

EasyLanguage: full-featured programming language designed for traders. Commands consist mostly of regular English words, which makes EasyLanguage easier to learn than more complex programming languages.

Ease of Use: Easylanguage is "limited" compared to C#. Mostly you can get around limitations and you could extend the capabilities via external DLLs. Tradestation has improved there a lot since Object-Oriented EasyLanguage was introduced.

Functionality: Easylanguage is an amazing tool for learning, but problems arise when you have a very large portfolio of systems traded, functions get a little clunky, slow, need a lot of memory. Backtests with a large amount of data also takes time (unlike AmiBroker AFL which is blazing fast). EL doesn't have good compiler/debugging support in either of the platforms that support it. Many traders use tools like the sharedvar server to expand this functionality to be able to debug subtle mistakes faster and make development a little more fluid.

AmiBroker AFL: Allows to write trading system rules, define your own indicators and custom commentaries. Full guide here.

Easy to use: AFL is not different from programming in any other langauge. Thus, AFL is syntactically similar to plain C and Java Script but easier to use. It also has lot of funcions that are trading related but general concepts are common in languages. Contrary to many general-purpose languages, Amibroker is able to process entire arrays (data series) without using loops which makes it both faster and easier to use than regular language.

Functionality: The editor is extremely functional, with an in-line syntax verifier that you can use to check your code before running an analysis. In addition, as you type, you can choose from a drop-down list of functions to speed up your coding.

ATF is a consise language: indicators written in AFL will take less typing and less space than in other languages because many typical tasks in AFL are just single-liners. For example dynamic, ATR-based Chandelier's stop is just:

ApplyStop( stopTypeTrailing, stopModePoint, 3* ATR(14), True, True );

Java Script: e-Signal uses Java Script as the basis for the scripting language named the EFS (eSignal formula scripting). EFS2, is the next evolution in eSignal Formula Script introduced with version 7.9. EFS2 functions make formula writing more macro-like and easier to code. The new EFS2 engine is backwards compatible with formulas developed prior to 7.9. Here's a list of the new EFS2 features added to the eSignal formula development environment.

Ease of use: eSignal was never intended to be used for automated trading so this feature was added at a much later date. We would never recommend a serious automated trader use eSignal EFS to design and run their systems.

Functionality: Good for backtesting once you master it. Most users are technical analysts and no advanced programmers and they will find it limited as they cannot at least test automated trading Live/Sim.

NinjaScript: If you want to have unlimited extensibility and full control and customizability over your NinjaTrader platform, then the C# based NinjaScript allows you to do this.  

Ease of Use: Being based on C#, there are no limits to NinjaScript. However, as far as programming languages go, C# isn’t the easiest. NinjaTrader do provide help sheets and tutorials, however, which can be very helpful

There are also professional NinjaScript programmers out there that can be hired to translate trading strategies into raw code, if you lack the proficiency.

Functionality: The highly functional NinjaScript can be used to automate your trading strategy, process trading signals from 3rd party applications as well as create your own 3rd party custom indicators.

Trading Technology uses Linux C++ API within their secure development environment in which traders can build and test trading strategies.

Users can however avoid writing syntax by using the ADL, which is a drag and drop environment.

Python, Java and Node.js can be used when developing your own trading application, which can make use of the reliable E*Trade API.

Learning Curve

Support: Interactive Brokers systems development can take a long time due to the API being poorly documented. For advanced user who know Python, C# etc. you will be able to figure out… it is simply hard work. It is not geared to users new to the programming world.

Learning: If you’re focused on the currency markets or only trading CFD’s, then see Metatrader 4 or Metatrader 5. It has low learning curve and has several solutions built-in. There is even a third-party open source bridge available if you’d like to use Python with Metatrader.

Support: Tradestation forum is extensive and active community which has been around for many years. Regular updates by the Tradestation developers.

Learning: App such as Tradestation University is available. There is plenty of learning resouces on the Tradestation Market Insights: Source

Support: AmiBroker’s manual and online support forum together offer a lot of insight into how the code editor works for advanced functions, although there is a significant learning curve to getting up and running with designing functions.

Significant learning curve: Most of default functions in the editor are templates with stand-in variables rather than actual values. This is great for experienced users who just want a quick reference when designing a new formula, but the lack of numerous basic formulas (for things like Bollinger bands, for example) can be trying for users who are new to AmiBroker.

Esignal forum has diminsihed in activity in the last two years. The platform has very few updates in the last couple of years and we see little support in the way of webinars and documenation. EFS knowledgeBase is a resource to learn all about the EFS language. This has not been updated and is very difficult to navigate. Help guides in the EFS KnowledgeBase was last updated in 2009! - Source 

Support: NinjaTrader prides itself on being relatively easy-to-use despite its high capacity for customization. 

And with 60,000 traders using NinjaTrader, there are many using NinjaScript. This means there’s a lot of support. The official forum can be helpful, with official replies as well as other users. 

Learning: NinjaTrader themselves have created tutorials and help sheets for NinjaScript, while there are also resources to learn the basics of the NinjaTrader platform too.

Support: There’s no demo account for traders to practice their strategy on, which is a significant limitation, making it slower learning curve. If you’re new to trading options, then the user interface looks very overwhelming and busy, making it difficult to comprehend. Furthermore, there is no built-in guidance when using the software. There’s no popup boxes that helps guide new users through the user interface. There may be external video content, but it’s not built-in meaning the UI takes longer to get to grips with.

Support: C++ is one of the most difficult programming languages due to it being an old language, with some flaws, as well as being stripped back. But this has its advantages, if you’re a good programmer. However, the ADL environment means you don’t have to write any code yourself. Whilst the capacity and potential for TT’s development environment is high, getting started is slow, as there’s a slight learning curve. The drag and drop nature of the environment however is useful in saving time, and can become efficient once users get to grips with it.

Learning: The web, mobile and desktop platform all have a shallow learning curve. With the benefit of an intuitive user interface, it’s one of the easier platforms to learn. There’s only an education environment and a tonne of support pages, but also a Youtube channel.

Programming/API: Example applications are provided on the developer side of the E*Trade website. These come with ReadMe files and .py files with some basics to help get started. There are also some “Getting Started” and Support pages on the website. Past this, users are on their own to develop a trading strategy.

YouTube Video Channel

Interactive Brokers Youtube channel is extensive. It not only is updated with learning videos but also expert market commentary which will help the active day trader

YouTube video learning channel for Tradestation is comprehensive as up to date. Source

No video resources

Esignal Youtube Channel has not been updated in the last two years! Source

NinjaTrader’s official Youtube channel is extremely helpful, with almost 600 videos. However, most of these are around learning technical analysis and NinjaTrader, as opposed to C# or NinjaScript itself.

Much of the Tastyworks learning content comes from Tastytrade website and not Tastyworks Youtube. However, this is streamed onto the Youtube channel, as well as an abundance of other content specifically for the channel. There are uploads at least 5 times a week, and the channel has almost 200k subscribers, which is a good indication that there’s some quality content.

Trading Technologies has a reasonably large back catalog of Youtube videos, most of which are educational. Videos are still being uploaded, around once a month, and generally, show how to manage and use the Trading Technologies trading platform.

Compatibility and Design

API connecting via TWS is powerful but awkward. IB has an API for TWS and IB Gateway which can program to executes any type of trade depending on the user expertise. IB Gateway: View and manage API orders, and connect to your account data and IB market data in a seamless experience with a minimal interface.

Tradestation 9.5 workspaces are not compatible with Tradestation 10 which is very annoying.

Tradestation is forming a relationship with other brokers like Interactive Brokers through International services such as Tradestation Global. With Global, Tradestation can be used as a data source for charting and automating systems and place orders directly to an Interactive Brokers account - this is nice addition especially for many Europeans who already have IB accounts.

AmiBroker can be customised heavily by advanced users so there are not major limitations but at that point it might just be easier to create your own platform. The compatibility with plug and play brokers APIs is non existant beyond Interactive Brokers. The easiest way to live trade using specialised backtesting and chart trading software would be to use Multicharts which is easy to setup and live trade with mutliple brokers

Java Script is commonly used so skills can transfer over. Esignal is not designed for fully automated and there is very little resources or guides on how to set this up. Currently only available with eSignal Futures Trader. Source

NinjaTrader is highly compatible. If you’re a good programmer, or wish to hire one, then NinjaScript is extremely powerful for automated trading.

The APIs are equally powerful, too. For example, you can easily connect your Interactive Brokers account over at NinjaTrader, as explained here. It’s not the easiest, as you must have the exact and correct version of TWS, and the setup can become messy.

Perhaps most impressive of all is the openness to 3rd party developers on the NT Ecosystem, which boasts over 1,000 3rd party applications.

Tastyworks falls behind its competitors when it comes to APIs and compatibility. As it’s not open-sourced and has no programmable environment, you’re left with only the software they provide. The design of the desktop software is fantastic but limiting. It’s almost entirely directed towards options trading, leaving equities behind. The design is difficult to get used to for beginners, but if you’re serious about option trading, it can be extremely economical and smooth to use. The desktop dashboard is nicely compartmentalized, and it’s easy to set up price alerts. The mobile app may have terrible customization surrounding the design, but the desktop version does allow you to change font sizes, colors, and chart settings.

Whilst it takes a while to get used to ADL, it’s an extremely visual way to build a trading algo. You can see the nodes, rules and flow of logic in one picture along with an error list, variables, breakpoints and so on. There’s also a useful dashboard in which the user can view all algos, their status, P/L and other data.

Like with most platforms, E*Trade uses multiple programming languages to help optimize each facet of the business. For example, the customer facing tools are mostly using c/c++ and Java, which Python and Perl are used for backend.

Compatibility: E*Trade is impressively compatible for users. Being available on mobile, desktop and web browsers, there really are no users left out here. The web browser platform is still highly functional and powerful, and the mobile platform mirrors this very closely - there’s not much functionality being left out of the mobile version.

Design: The E*Trade dashboard is well spaced out, and manages to host a lot of widgets and data without seeming overcrowded. Even when using a tablet, which is touch-orientated, the design holds up to be functional and intuitive. There’s a light and dark theme for charting, and the indicators are easy to apply. Furthermore, the visualisation of the portfolio analysis is extremely impressive, and can make the data easily digestible for beginners.

Speed and Performance Considerations

Many users like C++ because a dynamically typed language such as python will hurt performance. Java would be a close runner up. Python is easier to learn than C++ but it still times a lot of time to master. Having a complex system does not make it a winner. For High frequency trading C++ is preferable as you need to process a lot of data quickly. For swing trading Pythons popular, I don't see why you couldn't get similar results with JS, but you'd have to ask what the benefit of using it over Python would be. Interactive Brokers offer FIX CTCI solutions let you create your own trading system that takes advantage of our high-speed order routing and broad market depth. Source

EasyLanguage is faster than Python when placing trades (which is slow and primarily used for testing). With Easylanguage it is simple to create and test ideas without wasting time on complex coding exercises. Time spent programming can now be spent testing strategies which will yield better longer-term results. If you want to trade to make money then don't waste all your time developing custom platforms like so many software engineers. Making money should be the priority.

AmiBroker is written in C++, it runs natively on the CPU without need of any kind of virtual machine or byte-code interpreter, unlike Java or .NET programs. The fact that CPU runs native machine code allows achieving maximum execution speed. The AFL language can process as much as 166 million data bars per second on 2GHz CPU. The AmiBroker code has been hand optimized and profiled to gain maximum speed and minimize size. Small code runs many times faster because it is able to fit into CPU on-chip caches. Full setup program with example database and help files is just about 6 (six) megabytes, half of that is documentation and data. The executables alone (.exe and .dll libraries) are just 3.5 MB. 

Javascript is relatively fast but javascript is not recommended for algo trading, due to floating point numbers. You won't find too much that can help you in the JavaScript world for algorithmic trading.

C#, which NinjaScript is based on, is a significantly faster language to write in than many others (such as C++, which is more difficult). It’s relatively intuitive and easy to read, yet it’s not as bloated as Python, meaning it can run faster in most cases.

C# is hugely popular by algo traders due to its robustness and high performance and has a very small lag time meaning high frequency is possible. 

Tastyworks is built for speed, and is a 2017 company, it’s built on modern infrastructure. Even the search function, which isn’t great, still performs extremely quickly. It’s not just transactions that are executed quickly, but opening an account and customer service is also very speedy.

Trading Technologies uses C++ because it’s perhaps the most efficient at processing lots of data, meaning it’s great for high-frequency trading. The low-latency means speed is optimal. Trading technologies is the fastest trading platform that’s on the commercial market. Autospreader for example is extremely fast, and Trading Technologies in general is being leveraged by speed-sensitive traders. Trading Technologies’ X_Trader performs orders extremely quickly; perhaps outcompeting many other trading platforms on the market. Testing with 5 users on the Trading Technologies Gateway 7.15, gateway message delivery is 150 microseconds for the first and 5th user. It’s not only the execution of trades that’s fast either, but the search functionality and the autoroll feature too, which make using the platform a time-efficient experience.

Resilience and Limitations

Limitation to data requests: IB throttles data requests pretty hard. For instance, Amibroker is limited to 200 RT streaming from IB. Since each option contract is a symbol, cap gets hit quickly. So we do not recommend to use any 3rd party software with IB data.

Tradestation EasyLanguage also known as Powerlangue is cross-compatible with Multicharts. The majority of our clients use Multicharts with TradeStation. Therefore, learning EasyLanguage does give you the ability to use it on Multicharts which can easily be connected to many different brokers including Interactive Brokers.

Tradestation will be limited for overly complex high-frequency arbitrage type models. It is also relatively difficult to trade a portfolio of systems which can be controlled by a master system (this can mostly be achieved by using Global Variables of ELL collections)

AmiBroker seem to be run and developed by a single developer. AmiBroker should be use where it is inherently strong (e.g., indicator building, scanning, optimization, etc.) and other programs particularly for more advanced charting than offered by AB's "out of the box" options and/or a more user-friendly charting environment.

You can only use eSignal Futures Trader and this has limited resources and documentation. We would also not recommend using JavaScript for serious algo trading as C++ and Python or even simpler languages like Easylanguage are far superior and more widely used.

The largest limitation of NinjaTrader is the lack of markets and products that are accessible to the customer. If you’re not trading derivatives, then this platform is essentially useless.

The high withdrawal fees and the lack of a mobile or web app make the platform less than appealing.

However, those that are looking for a good research platform with great charting functionality will get some good value.

Perhaps the biggest limitation though is that the software is only available on Windows, which rules out millions of potential traders.

As mentioned in Compatibility and Design, Tastyworks is designed for Options traders. This leaves equity traders and beginners in the dark, as there are limited functionality and limited built-in guidance. There’s also limited customization for charts, which may put off some advanced traders. The workspace is also limited in customization. The search function can also be slightly confusing in its results. Non-US stocks also appear, despite not being able to trade or view the price information.

Drag and drop methods are always going to have limitations because they’re already pre-packaged. In this sense, they’re less customizable than if you were to use coding syntax. We believe that for some users the lack of customization might be a major issue, so we would recommend choosing other trading platforms, such as Amibroker.

User Reviews

"We've been throttling all brokerage API's for a few years now. Its a running joke in QuantConnect that we find the bugs in brokerage API's as algo trading at scale touches every corner of an API. Although its clunky and old tech the IB gateway is one of the more reliable and best modelled API's we've seen. Rather than downloading and installing zips etc, I'd recommend using the QuantConnect docker container. We maintain it, and run it in production across thousands of headless live trading machines."   

Source  2019

"My personal experience is that easylanguage sucks. Years ago I was new to coding and decided to learn easylanguage for Tradestation to code several different strategies. After learning the language and working for months coding the strategies, I ran into several limitations of EL. EL was the first programming language that I learned. I am still pissed off about wasting so much time."

Source 2020

"The general opinion seems to be, AFL is not an easy language to understand and that too is my experience, I think the software is great but understanding the coding difficult. Even if you go online looking for answers, many of the AFL crowd be making comments; "work it out yourself, that's the only way you'll learn."

Source 2019

"eSignal is the best global programmable platform in my opinion. I have evaluated various platform and this is definitely the best. eSignal allows you to view any stock in the world. That alone is very rare! With the programmable interface, I now can create my own custom indicators, scanners, strategies, etc. for any global market. That makes this platform a very powerful tool."

Source 2015

“NOT USER FRIENDLY...always breaking down or not working as it is supposed to. Would gladly go anywhere else.”

Source 2019

“Ninjatrader sucks big time. One of my main problems is that the platform can only be used in one PC. So, if you have multiple computers, you will not be allowed to use the same Ninjatrader account on all of your PCs, which is an obstacle. It is difficult to learn for new traders.”

Source 2020

"Love the app and service so far it was little confusing at first but turn out very easy and super fast execution, after watching many tasty trade show and when I open the account and deposit money the prompt asking would you like us front you the money before your deposit settle so you can start."

"they say they offer an API and I was able to get a sandbox api key and get a skeleton application working and pulling data. Now their sandbox api is so limited you can't really test any real world application on it, because it only provides prices for a few stocks."

Images

Winner: TradeStation

_{Methodology: programming languages for trading should be intuitive and relatively easy for new users to pick up. Every user will run into difficulty at some point, so the best programming language requires strong support from active forum members, learning videos or from 3rd party companies who support the language and platform.You can quickly access quotes, hot lists, and order matrix. The design is good and transitions from viewing your portfolio to sending orders is very easy due to the well-designed interface. It is possible to analyse and trade option spreads with strike and expirations and volume for markets. You can analyse charts with indicators and unlike the IB app which performs this task poorly Tradestation everything looks clean and clear.}

_{What matters most is how our algo can beat the market. This means a language which is fast and can process data quickly and send orders at a blistering pace. Most automated traders cannot afford to have lagging or buggy code which fails when it matters most.}

If you do not have a programming background, then do not reinvent the wheel and waste your time trying to develop your own platform. You need to use off the shelf packages like Tradestation, Multicharts or AmiBroker. We've compared TradeStation programming language with others, and all TradeStation reviews have proved the advantage of EasyLanguage. Easylanguage will allow 95% of traders to achieve their indicator and automated trading systems development goals. Moreover, the language is easy to learn and will help you pick up other advanced codes like Python and C++ when your require something more powerful.

Automated Trading and Backtesting

Interactive Brokers

TradeStation

AmiBroker

eSignal

NinjaTrader

Tastyworks

Trading Technologies

Backtesting

TWS is not suitable for back testing and strategy development. TWS in itself is not a backtesting tool. You could only use it to download historical data through their API (which uses TWS for connection to their data servers). You would then have to program your own backtesting tool to handle that downloaded data. In simple cases a spreadsheet might be sufficient for your strategy development, in more complex cases you would need to write some software in your language of choice. You could try already prebuilt platforms like Multicharts, Ninjatrader, Sierra Charts, AmiBroker to run your strategy backtest and connect them to the Interactive Brokers API. IB don't offer a real backtesting environment for your Python API. So you have to build your own backtesting environment. You should split it into 2 steps. Step 1 is collecting the historical data and step 2 is feeding your strategy with that data. You can use Portfolio Builder, It's an easy to use tool for testing simple strategies. Check here. I think it's very helpful for the first steps. For more advanced strategies you have to use API as mentioned above.

If running a strategy with lots of loops on timeframes over ten years, it can take a long time and has been known to freeze. We have had Tradestation 9.5 crash if we perform backtest optimisations using a lot of data.

Tradestation offers Walk-forward analysis as well as Monte Carlo analysis to be able to evaluate your strategy using historical data distributions.It can be challenging to run a portfolio backtest as Portfolio Maestro is needlessly complicated.

Backtests with large amount of data also take time (unlike AFL - except that tool is not made for live trading). 

Backtesting with bid and ask size is not possible.

AmiBroker claims they are the world's fastest portfolio backtesting and optimization. AmiBroker supports multithreading (parallel execution on all CPU cores) in both charting and New Analysis window. This enhances speed of operation and improves responsivity of application as worker AFL execution threads do not block the user interface. We ran some basic optimisations across all platforms and AmiBroker was the fastest. AmiBroker is a great backtesting tool. It is great piece of software. Highly customizable, stable, very fast and optimized C++ based. Way faster than institutional grade plataforms such as Deltix and QuantHouse. Amibroker is our prefered platform for prototyping (single and portfolio strategies). Moreover, you can call R and javascript form AB.

eSignal Back Test Report: back tests can be evaluated with a wealth of statistica to evaluate the performance of a strategy - your typical trades analysis, periodical analysis, grapgs etc..

eSignal EFS2 still does not have an EFS optimizer so you cannot optimize parameters for individual indicators. This would save time analysing new markets and certaintly useful for anyone even thinking of developing something more complex like Machine Learning programs. 

eSignal backtesting is limited for simple strategies, certainly not for anything complex. We would never recommend eSignal as a backtesting platform for a multitude of reasons: 1. EFS2 is needlessly complicated for what can be achieved. 2. No optimisation, Walk Forward Analysis, Genetic Algorithms and the list goes on and on. 3. The support for this language is very limited and the forum is pretty much dead.

Strategy Analyzer: NT has its own free tool to test automated strategies using historical data. Forward Walking tests are available, as well as multi-objective optimization so you can input values for more than one performance metric for a given test. Monte Carlo Simulations can also be run.

Of course, the limitations here are that it doesn’t include news stories or fundamental analysis, as is your price action and open/close times.

Backtesting was never available with Trading Technologies, until at the end of 2019 where a Beta version was announced. Now, the ADL developers out there can backtest their algos by executing multiple instances of the strategy with unique parameters, testing before and after changes and evaluating the execution behaviour of the Proof of Concept strategies. Users can also train and learn with no risk.

Live Automated Trading

Live Trading Performance: Interactive Brokers uses an aggregated tick data feed which makes trading high frequency virtually impossible. The IB Gateway API is well built but issues occur with disconnections over the weekend which is very annoying for fully automated traders.

Price cap: Interactive Brokers implements algorithms to cap the price of clients’ orders before sending them to the exchange. Although, these algorithms have multiple purposes, the main reason behind them is to prevent potential manipulation and fat finger mistakes. In simple terms, IB has a price band around the reference price: the order will be capped to the brand price limit, if someone tries to place a buy limit order above that band or a sell limit order below that band. The downside of that is with fast-moving markets. The price caps do not get updated as fast as the markets, leaving traders with either trades they cannot execute at current market prices or with positions they hold which cannot close at current market prices.

Hold option spreads: IB might hold options spreads internally until they feel they are marketable.

Auto liquidation program: Since it is not done manually, the computer makes decisions that can be extremely negative, on what, when and how they liquidate.

Live Trading Performance: At Quant Savvy we trade our Chimera Algo Bot live on both Tradestation and Multicharts connected to Interactive Brokers/Gain/AMP etc. We use every major broker for live trading for our clients. The same strategy is traded on different Servers located in the same location. I feel this puts us in a unique position to compare the actual live performance (nearly all other forums and debates on this topic do not see daily live fill comparisons for automated systems). We have calculated the fills difference between brokers when trading the same automated trading strategy, and we find Tradestation has the lowest latency and better fills, this can sometimes be as much as two tick better with common Emini instruments - read more.

AB does not send orders to you broker with built in functions. You most have a DLL made for your broker. So, this DLL will make some specific functions available and they will be different from broker to broker.

AmiBroker is not plug and play for real-time trading such as Multicharts, NinjaTrader, Sierra Charts (read MultiCharts and NinjaTrader review). There is a lot of coding between the backtest and live production. But depending on how good coder you are, there is no limit what can you achieve with AB. Unless you have strong coding skills or extensive knowledge of the pitfalls of live trading with AmiBroker we would suggest you another platform for live automated trading. Many newbie users have had multiple issues with sending repeat orders.

eSignal is not designed for fully automated trading, however, it is compatbile with Interactive Brokers API for live trading.

eSignal has a 3rd party charting software does not have API access to any other brokers.

iSystems: iSystems allows users to view the top 10 performing auto-strategies based on various timeframes. There are also filters to narrow your search when viewing all the systems, such as Worst Drawdown, Tracked PnL, as well as factors such as Required Capital and Market Traded. There are over 1,000 systems! Any complex automated trading is usually completed in NinjaScript, which is based on C#, but it can also be imported.

Ninjatrader renders charts in 250ms, which is a lot slower than SierraChart, for example, renders in 10ms.

You cannot perform live algorithmic trading on Tastyworks, other than automated executions such as basic order inputs.

Live Automated Trading: Autotrader allows the user to develop and execute strategies with an interface similar to Excel. There’s some great features too, such as multiple levels of automation, Excel integration, built-in formula engine, strategy prices deriving from the market/theoretical values. There’s also an auto spreader which has multiple MD trader windows, allowing the user to auto trade calendar and inter-product spreads.

Trade Management and Historical Trades

Portfolio Summary: Measure your portfolio performance with a full allocation breakdown for each account.

Portfolio Analyst: Consolidate, track and analyze your finances. Combine your IBKR account with your other brokerage, checking, savings, annuity, incentive plan and credit card accounts for a whole-portfolio view of your finances.

Reporting: Quickly generate account activity or performance statements. Use Flex Queries to create sophisticated analyses of your account and quickly generate Risk, TCA and other reports. Supplemental Tax information and reporting is available for your record keeping.

Tradestation TradeManager: App window displays trade and account activity. All orders are logged to the TradeManager window on a real-time basis. Orders are color-coded so you can differentiate between different order statuses at a glance. Colors are updated in real-time as the status of your orders changes. You can quickly close positions and cancel orders from the TradeManager window, as well as view your order history. Source

TradeManager Analysis: is used to evaluate the performance of trades completed (open and closed) from one or more TradeStation accounts during a specified date range. You can also filter the report to include/exclude symbols of your choosing. When you click Generate, selected data from your account is polled and a summary report is produced. Once generated, the TradeManager Analysis Report enables you to view information such as total net profit, total number of trades, largest losing trade, and more.

AmiBroker Account Manager: Account manager is a tool for keeping track of your trades and your performance. You are able to enter trades you make, deposit/withdraw funds, check the statistics and historical performance. All transactions are recorded so you will never forget what happened in the past. Account manager allows you to keep track of unlimited number of accounts.

AmiBroker's portfolio backtester lets you combine trading signals and trade sizing strategies into simulations which exactly mimic the way you would trade in real time. A core feature is its ability to perform dynamic money management and risk control at the portfolio level. Position sizes are determined with full knowledge of what's going on at the portfolio level at the moment the sizing decision is made. Just like you do in reality.

Trade Manager: you can trade directly from your chart and manager orders quickly with the eSignal Trade Manager. With eSignal 12 the Trade Manager was significantly improved, it has DOM display and you can add trailing stops, scaling out of positions, mulit-level stops etc. We do like that you can change all colours for every columns and cell.

Trade Management: As you would expect, there are a lot of ways to pre-define trade entries and exits, as well as multiple targets and stops.

There’s no limit to strategy templates that can be configured in order to manage your trades.

As mentioned above, ChartTrader has a color-coded method of managing current positions and trades.

Historical Trades: Historical trades can be viewed under the Performance Data Tabs. This produces a summary tab of your net profit, gross profit, profit factor, max drawdown, total trades, average trade, and so on.

The chart tab produces backtested trade data, whilst there are also some efficiency graphs too.

Trade Management: The activity tab allows you to see open positions very clearly, which exists both on desktop and the mobile app. You can apply filters here, and also view historical trades. Fortunately, the watchlists are the same across all of Tastyworks platforms. The tab is always on the left, and then you can view options chains and access tools for analysis, strategy, and charting. The portfolio report is great, albeit options focused. It shows the theta and delta values, though these columns can be customized. The portfolio and fee report can both be exported to CSV, and are very easy to digest and manage.

Trade Management: Historical fills can be viewed quickly which allows users to track past performance. Users select a date range and all trades are displayed clearly. The order toolbar is a means to manage current trades, in which you can cancel, inquire, pause (algo), cancel bids, and cancel offers. There’s also a “?” feature where you can read the original order details.

Portfolio Testing and Trading

Interactive Brokers is not designed as a backtesting tool - you can use a 3rd party or build your own software and use IB as the data feed.

Portfolio Maestro: It can be challenging to run a portfolio backtest as Portfolio Maestro is needlessly complicated. We ran a simple strategy test of 100 lines to run on 1800 equity symbols. Portfolio Maestro many many painful times, and there are two comments to make: a. Portfolio Maestro's local database cannot keep all the downloaded data - so you have to reload a lot (or all of it if your computer was just turned on) every time! For me, downloading 1800 symbols of daily data (not intraday) takes about half an hour. b. Including the aforementioned half hour, the total backtest takes about 2 and a half hours.

AmiBroker supports true portfolio backtesting with realistic currency conversion. Rotational trading, ranking etc. Also portfolio trading is possible.

eSignal backtesting cannot be performed on portfolio.

There is not only the in-built strategy Analyzer, but a whole host of 3rd party add-ons that are in the ecosystem to help test trades.

There aren’t many features to perform portfolio testing on Trading Technologies, other than the ADL backtester which allows users to train, learn and execute algos to validate proof of concept.

Data Stability and Speed

Tick aggregation delay which means strategies relying on Milliseconds are wasting their time. IB's streaming data is sampled so you get updates at 250ms intervals. Your quote could be that old by the time you get it regardless of where your connection to IB is.

At Quant Savvy we have multiple Interactive Brokers accounts running on our servers - we find the tick data feed to be completely unpredictable. Many times one platform will have different tick data to another Interactive Brokers platform. At the end of the day when you load the actual historical data, you will find many discrepancies from the live day session. Algo trades have been missed due to this poor tick data feed where one platform price is hit and filled and on another, it is not.

Can be left open for weeks at a time without any issues. Automated Trading systems have no problem working day after day. They have worked on platform stability considerably with recent updates and this shows with the performance.

Live data and historical data is accurate. We have heard from other traders that the workstation for Tradestation 9.5 has frozen many times with as little as four workspaces and total seven charts open - we have not had this occur on our servers ever!

In our experience, the primary grievance is when an automated strategy encounters an error mid trade and turns off – there is no alert for when this happens which can be an issue especially if you have a day job.

AmiBroker Crash Recovery System: AmiBroker is now able to recover from such unexpected situations. AmiBroker's crash recovery system introduced in v3.47 beta intercepts the exception generated by Windows and instead of standard dead-end message box and allows you to Try to recover, Exit program, Copy to clip, Troubleshoot, Send report.

Charts look great but take very long to load and display. It took us over 60 seconds to load daily data for futures markets looking back 10 years.

eSignal data can at time be unreliable with lag especially in a fast market.

Data used from the Interactive Brokers API is slow, meaning you will want to choose the one recommended by NT, Kinetick. Kinetick data when using NinjaTrader is reliable, with accurate live and historical data.

Tastyworks is renowned for fast and reliable data feeds. The information you receive, as well as the trades you make, are performed to a high standard of speed. If speed is important to the user, then the desktop version should be preferred over the web and app platform, because it will stream data much faster.

The Colocated servers of TT mean that, whether you’re building your algo or trading on your phone or desktop, you’re accessing super low-latency trading potential. The C++ programming language along with these Colocated executions mean that TT is arguably the fastest trading platform available to retail traders. For all of Trading Technologies’ lack of certain features, its simplicity and infrastructure is at least conducive towards a hyper-fast trading experience. However, if you are not a professional trader, then there are quite a few alternatives to choose from which we’ve discussed here. For instance, TradeStation can offer much better data stability and more features for lower prices.

Images

Winner: TradeStation (ease of automated trading)/ AmiBroker (backtesting speed)

_{Methodology: Backtesting must be well designed so it does not inflate performance. Strong backtesting platform will achieve the same backtesting execution logic in both backtest and live trading. Many day trading platforms find it difficult handling fills on backtest as time series data often uses open and close on 1 min,. 5min, 60min bars. Backtesting should allow users to test entries and execution within bars on a tick by tick basis (assuming you have historical tick data note: Tradestation provide 6 months of tick data for most futures symbols). - Automated systems developer commonly run a portfolio of systems like we do with the Chimera Bot at Quant Savvy. We need the ability to test each system in the portfolio so we can quick assess overall long term combined drawdowns, monte carlo analysis and most importantly correlation between systems. - What is the point of strong backtesting if the live trading is slow, executes poorly or is not stable. Automated trading should not require human intervention and requires stability as with strong software coding and checks in places a user can be alerted quickly of any potential malfunctions}

Nothing beat AmiBroker backtesting speed, however, the lack of API broker plugins and need for more expert coding knowledge to ensure live automated trading functions correctly prevent AmiBroker from being the overall winner for automated trading section. TradeStation, on the other hands, can be nominated as the best day trading platform for automated trading and backtesting.

Tradestation is a one-stop-shop and it is very easy to backtest on an individual market, run a portfolio test, and turn systems on for live trading with 1 click. The platform is both automated trading software and live brokerage. We recommend Tradestation as the best automated day trading platform at Quant Savvy and it is used by nearly 70% of all our clients. This TradeStation review, as well as our personal experience, have proved that TradeStation can be left open for weeks at a time without any issues.

Customer Support and Learning Resources

TradeStation

AmiBroker

eSignal

NinjaTrader

Online, Telephone, Email and Account Services Support

Interactive Brokers customer service is excellent. Interactive Brokers support a wide range of languages including English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Russian, Mandarin, Cantonese, and Japanese. Interactive Brokers has a BrokerNotes triple AAA support rating because they offer a wide range of languages and support options. Live chat is responsive and we managed to quickly connect to a represenative. Call-back service. Interactive Brokers alsp provide customer support through Knowledge Base.

IBot: uses a foundation of artificial intelligence to quickly service customer requests via chat (or voice in the iPhone app). Portfolio information, orders, quotes, and more are all supported. Think, "What's the last price of GOOG?" or, "Chart AAPL vs. MSFT" or, "Buy 100 shares of FB." Only TD Ameritrade can go toe-to-toe with IBot.

TradeStation customer service is slow: Talking with Quant Savvy systems clients directly who use Tradestation we often get the same response of very slow service, often call wait times of 1 hour.   Brokerage support or technical support has always been negative for Tradestation, many users complain about excessive wait times and lack of customer support.

AmiBroker customer support is open 5 days a week: Regular support is open 5 days a week from Monday to Friday (8:00-18:00 GMT).

ChatBot: offers artificial intelligence support assistant (AISA) to quickly answer general questions No support during weekends

No phone support: AmiBroker does not provide phone support. Instead, they offer an email contact option.

We tried the live Sales chat online which could not fund a operator. We tried the support live chat and again could not connect. The mobile support is non existant.

Telephone: NinjaTrader provide customer support via phone calls. There is “24/5 and weekend” technical support, as well as a 24-hour emergency trade support line too — toll-free.

There are several email addresses regarding different issues, as well as a form to request support.

Disappointingly, there is no live chat or chatbot to help deal with immediate concerns that do not require a phone call.

Customer services are available over the phone, live-chat or by email. There are also different email addresses regarding different issues/needs of the customer. Generally, Tastyworks reviews indicate that customer service is adequate and usually quite fast. The Tastyworks help and support page on the website is quite strong. It’s divided into different topics, in which you can view solutions to common problems. If you can’t see it there, you can press “get help” and opt for the fast live chat option.

Trading Technologies asks customers to open a ticket on the website if the issue is a non-emergency. Customer support will then reach out in their own time to resolve the issue. If the issue is more urgent, there is a phone line for the US, Americas, Asia, Australia, Europe/Middle East and finally, Japan. Phone lines are staffed from 12pm Sunday to 5pm Friday (CT). The website is written in English, but there is a Japanese translated site too.

Forum and Community Support

IBKR Traders' Insight: key resource for market participants seeking timely commentary directly from industry professionals on the front lines of today's fast moving markets. Discussion topics cover Fixed Income, Forex, Futures, Macro, Options, Securities Lending, Stocks and Technical Analysis. Commentary from nearly 120 contributors covering markets in the Americas, Europe and Asia. Source.

IBKR Quant Blog: serves quantitative professionals who have an interest in programming. Discussion topics include deep learning, artificial intelligence (AI), Blockchain and other transformative technologies influencing modern markets. Commentary from nearly two dozen contributors covering markets in the Americas, Europe and Asia. Discussions about R, Python and other popular programming languages often include sample code to help you develop your own analysis. IBKR Student and Corporate blogs are also available.

Tradestation Forum: The forum even though extensive is outdated and is very difficult to navigate and search various topics. You cannot search the forum with simple google searches which makes it difficult for non-Tradestation clients to get answers on technical issues they might want answering before they join. Tradestation offers one-hour private learning sessions for $150.

In 2019, TradeStation launched 

YouCanTrade: an independent education-focused website run separately from TradeStation brokerage. Traders can pay to gain access to full-featured courses, including webinars, live trading room access, real-time alerts, and more. Source

Forum: AmiBroker has a very active forum. AmiBroker founder is also actively contributing in conversations, answering various questions.

Fast support: Installation and basic support questions are answered within 24 hours (usually 1-3 hours in office hours). Advanced support question may take a few days depending on complexity and time availability.

Forum: The Forum activity has decreased considerably in the last 5 years. There is very little support for the EFS language so creating automated strategies is a difficult task.

eSignal Elite/ Advance GET provides live weekly 2-hour mentoring / Foundations of trading events. However, we found the last Past Mentoring Session archived was in November 7, 2018! There has been 3 posts in 2020 in eSignal section of the forum all with less than 5 responses - Source

Forum: There is an official forum on the NinjaTrader website in which customers frequently post questions. Impressively, many are met with responses from NT workers, meaning their voice extends and engages with customers.

Being a reasonably big trading platform, there’s also a lot of help elsewhere on the internet, such as Youtube and Reddit.

Tastyworks doesn’t have a designated forum of its own, meaning that community support is difficult to find. There are other trading forums in which Tastyworks is discussed, but given its relatively new and not yet a market leader, community support isn’t in abundance.

Community Section: Trading Technologies have their own community section of the website. Within this there is a forum in which posts are regular. Most are regarding users’ requests for advice in building their algorithms, or issues they come across. Most posts receive at least one reply, so this can certainly be a helpful resource.

Opening and Account

For UK: Interactive Brokers is regulated by Financial Conduct Authority , new client must pass a few compliance checks to ensure that you understand the risks of trading. Opening an account you require: A scanned colour copy of your passport, driving license or national ID, utility bill or bank statement from the past three months showing your address

In the US: regulated by FINRA Proof of identity: ID / passport / driver's license Proof of residency: bank statement / utility bill Customer feedback has highlighted that opening an account with Tradestation can be a slow process. Source

N/A

N/A

You can open the NinjaTrader account and access the trading software almost anywhere in the world. However, you must select either Dorman Trading or PhillipCapital when in the UK if you wish to trade Futures, or FXCM if you’re trading Forex. The standard FCA compliance questions will be asked.

If you’re in the US, then OANDA and FOREX.com must be used for Forex trading. Identification and regulation is a little more dependent on the State you’re in.

At least $50 must be sat in your account at all times in order to keep the user ID active.

Opening an account is supposed to be fast at Trading Technologies, but many users experience issues with verifying emails, logging in and general bugs in the process of opening an account.

The process of opening an account with E*Trade is fully digital and friendly for beginners, with no minimum deposit or deposit fee. Whilst it’s user friendly and the online application is fast, the funding process can take several days. Furthermore, E*Trade is only for US clients.

Deposits, Withdrawals Process

Cash management: Cash sitting idle beyond $10,000 will earn interest. For clients with high cash balances, cash management with Interactive Brokers is a great perk. Difficulty creating an account: The majority of users complain about the long review period of new accounts.

Tradestation has a bad reputation for non-user-friendly deposit and withdrawal process and customer service. 

N/A

Esignal is not a brokerage. However, its account management platform for adding data fees, market access or selecting different products has a very poor user interface.

Withdrawals must be at least $250 when processed via Wire. Check withdrawals only work for US residents and will not be sent to addresses overseas. Again, a minimum of $250 must be withdrawn.

You can also transfer funds Broker to Broker, which are a little trickier. You’re advised to email treasury support before submitting it in the transfer.

User Reviews

"Good commissions, average trade platform, but chaotic margin handling and extremely poor and bad customer service. Bay far the worst CS. Inexpert and bounder. Rarely receive specific answer to my questions, usually 1 sentence or a copy+paste bullpoo. Getting fed up with them." Source 2020

"4 Stars - I had some problems creating an account but good think they helped me. Execution is very good. I also like the commissions. I'm happy with interactive brokers." Source 2020 

“I tried to make a tradestation account since February. I spent 40+ hour to do it. First, impression it might seem like a decent customer service but they end up rebounding you between different departments. They stole $130 dollars to me plus most importantly the time.” Source 2020

“Spoke with a representative about have funds transferred out of the account. Never told me there would be fees, only found out when I was missing $125 after settlement. Told that I wasn't eligible for a refund because I didn't specifically ask about fees.” Source 2020

“Contact service guys are tremendously helping every query and they go beyond to help the clients. Such a lovely platform to invest. It was my 5th payment today.” Source 2020

"Registered ( and having up-to-date licenze) users, have lost one way of receiving support (via email) and at the same time, not registered (probably illegal) AmiBroker users, acquired possibly of receiving support from AmiBroker's official community and most importantly - from AmiBroker's developer - Tomasz Janeczko. That is very questionable to me - because I don't know why Tomasz and official AmiBroker's community should support illegal users if they don't support AmiBroker..." Source 2017

"Tomasz is one of the most intelligent, diligent and cool headed person I have encountered. Amibroker is one and the forum are perfect example. With the search funcion, despites it has been introduced only recently, I could easily find solution to my problem. With the forum growing, I think Tomasz will be freed to answer advanced questions and development. I also liek to thank adsvanced AB users help and guidance on the forum" Source 2017

"The current employees of eSignal, now called ICE Retail Services, are the most nasty and incompetent people I've worked with in 20 years as a trader. Worse, they are now using their employment as a front to hide illegal and malicious activities - I am talking about hacking into their customer's computers. The retail arm of ICE is a dangerous and vindictive organisation and you are advised not to touch their software or have anything to do with them." Source 2019

"I have ESignal Advanced GET software and disappointed with both the software and the standard of service provided by Interactive Data Corporation which is the mother company.Advanced GET software is not clunky and functions quite well. But it has no outstanding benefits for me as a trader. The EW function has not been used for years as it is momentum based and really has nothing factored into it relevant to the rules and guidelines of elliott wave. What is worse is whatever has been programmed into the EW function is unknown because the Company says it is a *proprietary* indicator. Just via experience I can tell it is largely a momentum based indicator but clearly it is not a genuine indicator of RN Elliott's theory. So they expect people to use this indicator without having an understanding of what it is monitoring in the market. So people need to ask themselves what does the software have to warrant an expensive price of $4.5K AUD. A joke really. To make matters worse the software you have paid $4.5K for cannot be used unless you pay eSignal US$60 a month ongoing. This is just a fee to acquire any data for the software but does not actually include any data as these are all add ons depending on what market or service you want. Worse still, no other data provider can be fed into Advanced GET so you are stuck with e Signal as an expensive data provider. The data is clean but you pay expensively for everything you get. The software enables good manual analysis of the market and is not clunky. A range of the generalised technical analysis indicators is provided that are useful but these indicators are common in far less expensive software programs. Specialised indicators come at an additional and expensive monthly fee." Source 2017

“I was a customer of Ninja Trader for 9 years and they have gotten progressively worse as the years passed. The customer service has gotten terrible. It seems the only thing on there mind is to collect that 50.00 dollar fee that they have to change the rules to keep receiving it.”

Source 2018

“No other brokerage in the world provides better service or rates than tastyworks"

“Slow logins and once you switch out to another app. It does not maintain in the background, having to force close and reopen the app. Can you do something about it. Very challenging to use..."

"Dealing with Etrade customer service as been excruciatingly frustrating. I will transfer my account somewhere else as soon as I have some time and the pandemic is over. Don't open account with Etrade!"

"God help you if you have to ever get somebody live on the phone! 45 minute wait times are not uncommon. I once had to wait 1.5hrs on hold. I only call maybe 1 time every other year but the frustration is enough to get me looking to dump these jokers"

"I find ETrade quite helpful as their customer service was very friendly and convenient. It increased my profit and gave me expect result."

Images

Winner: Interactive Brokers

_{Methodology: How easy it is to open and fund an account is very important for day traders, money managers and hedge funds. However, the ongoing support is more important especially for fundamental traders or those investors who require a more human service.  - Learning to correctly use a complex day trading platform requires a strong online community with extensive education and learning tools. eSignal has shown that their support is lacking and small platforms like AmiBroker have no telephone support. Clients at Quant Savvy have informed us many times of long call wait times with Tradestation as well as lengthy account opening process.}

Interactive Brokers is the best day trading platform for traders who require additional support along the way. In this Interactive Brokers review, Ib is a clear winner for providing customer support for their clients. Interactive Brokers has many resources including the very intuitive IBot which we have used successfully on numerous occasions.

Security

TradeStation

AmiBroker

eSignal

NinjaTrader

Monitoring, Encryption

Monitoring: account monitoring, customer alerts, withdrawal limits. State-of-the-art transaction monitoring systems and maintain a dedicated security team that is responsible for detecting suspicious activity. If an unusual or suspicious transaction is noted, a member of this team may contact you to confirm the validity of the transaction.

Unique usernames and strong passwords: To secure Interactive Brokers login, this brokerage uses unique usernames and strong passwords. IBKR restricts account access following a specified number of failed login attempts. App authentication required to login adds extra layer of security.

Encrypted communication: Secure Socket Layer IBKR deploys 2048-bit EV Certificates, TLS 128-bit or higher encryption to establish a secure connection and ensure the confidentiality and integrity of information passed between your computer and IBKR. Activate SSL by checking the "Use SSL" box on the TWS login dialog. Using SSL may impact the performance of your PC depending on its capabilities. Automated monitoring systems to ensure only strong encryption algorithms are used. Source IBKR enforces all website traffic to use encryption. Built in an auto-logoff feature that logs you out of the application after a specified period of inactivity.

Firewalls: Advanced hardware and software firewalls help to prevent unauthorized parties from gaining access to the system and personal information.

Monitoring: TradeStation constantly monitors customer accounts to detect suspicious activity. The customers are notified about significant changes made in their profile or account, such as login credentials, contact information, account setting and more.

Unique usernames and strong passwords: TradeStation login is secured by various authentication factors. All TradeStation customers are required to select unique usernames and strong passwords when they open a new account. Whenever an unknown device attempts to log in to TradeStation, the further validation of identity will be required by answering one of the security questions.

Encrypted communication: To protect customer’s account while it is accessed and managed online, TradeStation website and applications use 256-bit data encryption (TLS/SSL).

Firewalls: Advanced hardware and software firewalls help to prevent unauthorized parties from gaining access to the system and personal information.

Additional support: TradeStation is also advising clients to take necessary steps on their end to secure their accounts and information – read here.

AmiBroker is not a brokerage

Esignal is not a brokerage

Encrypted communication: NinjaTrader login process is encrypted, APIs are outside of their control, so this is when the user is most at risk of a security breach.

Monitoring: Physical, procedural and electronic safeguards are in place in order to protect personal information from unauthorized access.

Encrypted Communication: Tastyworks claim to encrypt as much data and interactions as possible.

Monitoring: In regards to monitoring accounts, they’re in line with rigorous regulation to ensure they’re protected from cyber hacks as well as fraudulent activity.

Encrypted Communication: Trading Technologies uses Diffie-Hellman encryption for their network security. This means users passwords are automatically encrypted and secured when using the gateway.

The DH parameters file is a file that’s encrypted, containing all common parameters used in calculating the secret keys.

Encrypted communication: E*Trade has not yet had any data breaches to date, which suggests their encryption and cyber security is at a good standard. E*Trade is regulated by SEC and FINRA, two top-tier regulators.

Safety of Funds

Interactive Brokers (U.K.) Limited (“IBUK”) is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority (“FCA”) as an investment firm and a participant in the Financial Services Compensation scheme (“FSCS”). Certain eligible clients qualify for compensation under the FCA Compensation rules.

Customer securities accounts at IBLLC are protected by the Securities Investor Protection Corporation (“SIPC”) for a maximum coverage of $500,000 (with a cash sublimit of $250,000) and under IBLLC's excess SIPC policy with certain underwriters at Lloyd's of London for up to an additional $30 million (with a cash sublimit of $900,000) subject to an aggregate limit of $150 million. Futures, and options on futures are not covered. As with all securities firms, this coverage provides protection against failure of a broker-dealer, not against loss of market value of securities.

TradeStation Futures accounts: Held at TradeStation Securities, Inc: Futures Commission Merchant (FCM) that carries customer accounts, is subject to the Customer Protection Rule requirements of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) Rules 1.20 and 30.7. These rules state that the company is required to maintain enough cash and cash equivalents in special reserve accounts, and identified as such, to cover at all times the required segregation reserve amounts. The reserve requirement must be calculated daily and filed electronically through the National Futures Association’s (NFA) web-based WinJammer system. Additionally, the company must also properly segregate these funds from any other proprietary bank account of the company. As of September 30, 2019, TradeStation had $602.7 million segregated in accordance with the above CFTC requirements. For detailed information, please see the Firm’s FCM disclosures : Click here

N/A

N/A

NinjaTrader is regulated in the US under the CFTC. However, the funds you deposit in the futures commission merchant for trading is not protected in the event of bankruptcy or insolvency of the merchant.

However, with NinjaTrading predominantly being used as a software, and when being connected to an external brokerage, the emphasis on security is placed more on the brokerage.

Two Factor Authentication

Two-factor authentication: Factor One: Each account requires a unique username/password combination for access. Factor Two: Secure Login System. Participants receive a personal security device which provides a randomly-generated security code. This code is used in conjunction with the username and password to access secure areas. Click here for additional details on the Secure Login System.

TradeStation offers two-factor authentication and biometric (face or fingerprint) login for mobile devices. In 2019, the firm implemented technology designed to detect attempted fraudulent account openings, and it added enhancements to safeguard against fraudulent cash transfers out of client accounts.

N/A

N/A

N/A

Two factor authentication is possible with Trading Technologies, in which users must submit their SMS number correctly.

Overall Winner: TradeStation

​Interactive Brokers is an all-rounder and a comprehensive electronic brokerage. IB day trading platform is suitable for money managers and hedge funds, it supports many different account types. IB account opening process, funding and ongoing support is fantastic despite what you hear on the net.

For day traders it has very low commissions and trading costs relative to other brokers. However, no serious day trader will use Interactive Brokers for charting or technical analysis. You need a 3rd party Charting package that can connect to IB allowing you to easily place orders via chart using trendlines, automation or DOM - we recommend Multicharts as a solid charting package that can easily connect to Interactive Broker IB Gateway API.  

Market access is unparalleled to any other electronic broker. However, for those subscribing to basic level 1 data just be cautious if you intend to use tick data. IB uses an aggregated tick data feed which is terrible, it will never match other data feeds such as Rithmic, CQG or IQFeed tick data. Interactive Brokers also restricts historical data with historical pacing which allows a certain amount of data to be requested before they place a pacing violation and you have to wait 5 minutes before requesting more. 

Be mindful of reviews on the internet as you often only hear the voice of negative reviewers, we have been using IB for Quant Savvy systems for over a decade and even with its flaws, as a standalone electronic broker, there is nobody better. We believe that in this Interactive Brokers review, Quant Savvy provides a clear and independent point of view to compare this trading platform with others, including one of its main rivals, TradeStation. If you are looking for a safe secure broker with access to lots of markets then Interactive Brokers is a great fit if run alongside 3rd party charting software. 

TradeStation is the best day trading platform for beginners and intermediate traders using technical analysis or algorithmic trading. The EasyLanguage for programming has a flat learning curve and even beginners should be able to pick it up within one week. 

TradeStation weakness is its customer support and account opening process. Many Quant Savvy clients have had delays with opening accounts, contacting technical support or even registering the IP address of a computer.  

TradeStation offers free software and free market data which is wonderful news. You can load 90 days of historical tick data for Futures markets which can easily be exported and stored in a database to be used later. There are no restrictions on historical data and we find we can easily load a 1-minute chart all the way to 1999 within a couple of minutes. 

Automated Trading has some limiting features and we still cannot easily trade a portfolio without placing an individual system on its own chart.  Despite this we find you can create a strategy with Easylanguage, test it on free historical data (the backrests are slow relative to Multicharts to AmiBroker) and run it live or in Simulation fully automated - the whole process is so smooth. Even beginners looking for their typical moving average crossover systems can most certainly code, test and run a system live within an hour with ease.

TradeStation review has revealed that as a broker TS is very competitive with trading fees and commissions. TradeStation, when compared to Interactive Brokers, has higher commission fees and it has limited access to market exchanges. However, for the average US Futures, Crypto, Stocks or Options Trader it has all major market access you will need. If you are an institutional investor our advice would be to try Interactive Brokers - we perceive that as brokers Tradestation and IB are competing in a different space. We've also compared TradeStation vs NinjaTrader vs MultiCharts, where TradeStation has also achieved the overall winner award.

The mobile app is exceptional as shown by the high reviews comparable to the other platforms. It has a very intuitive well-designed user interface that allows quick easy access to place trades, monitor a portfolio, or check account balances in realtime. 

TS offers a 1-stop shop (charting, testing, data feed, broker). We have yet to find a system that cannot be implemented with Tradestation - our advice at Quant Savvy to new traders is not to develop your own trading platform it is not going to magically make you money. Your time is best spent developing automated trading systems using already built and tested 3rd party software, if you cannot be successful with a Multicharts or Tradestsation then we question whether your strategy will perform on your own custom-built platform.

Tradestation review has proved that TS is a clear winner when it comes to the Mobile app, easy live Automated Trading, extensive free historical data, free 90-day tick data and a strong charting package. 

AmiBroker is a software engineers/programmers dream just because of its flexibility based on your programming skill level. Therefore, for programming enthusiasts, it might be considered as the best day trading platform. You can customize nearly every aspect of the software to suit your needs. The backtesting is blazing fast and you can create and test systems very easily and efficiently using the AmiBroker AFL language. For non-programmers, there is a significant learning curve and you will find it difficult to easily automate a strategy just because of the lack of broker API plugins. The program and website look dated and old but do not let that distract you from the quality of the product (sometimes software companies waste too much time and money on marketing instead of development of the product).

The support and forum are okay and the developer seems to answer many questions directly which is good as he gets to see first hand any user issues. We are concerned that there only seems to be one developer as this questions the long term survivability of this product. The user reviews tend to be good but might be biased as most users tend to be experienced in this field and certainly nearly all have development and programming skills. We would not recommend this as a best day trading platform to a newbie looking to get started with automated trading, as there are easier programs like Tradestation and Multicharts which could be used to perform the exact same functions.

AmiBroker is not a broker and subsequently does not have a mobile app. AmiBroker also does not support chart trading without coding your own chart trading setup. AmiBroker is let down by having no real easy method to connect to a broker and directly trade with a DOM - this is a real shame and something they should have implemented by now.

If you are looking to backtest and create automated systems using very and optimized C++ type language which allows you to do everything dependent on your skill level then AmiBroker might be for you. If you want to run your system live then you will need to connect to an API for your selected broker. We recommend AmiBroker as a great backtesting tool but only for those with existing knowledge and skillset.

eSignal will be obsolete software in the future. This once excellent charting software albeit the high costs used to win awards. We remember a time in 2003 testing eSignal and experiencing a wow moment as it was clearly superior to other charting packages at the time. eSignal attempted to stay relevant but failed with any real automated trading development, the EFS and EFS2 programming languages are clunky and difficult to use. There is no real method to plugin an API and trade fully automated nor would we ever recommend this with eSignal as it is clearly not designed for this purpose. 

eSignal 12 still has great charting, indicators and generally as a charting package it gets good reviews. For a technical analyst who wants a slick design and features like the outstanding Market Profile offered by eSignal then eSignal might be an option. However, it is far away from earning the best day trading platform title. Anything more than some technical analysis features and design does not justify the extensive cost.

eSignal community and support are now non-existent, we already found the community is inadequate with barely any forum activity or responses. The YouTube channel has not been updated in years. The relevant information on the website is not up to date. The whole operation seems like they are destined to close in the near future - we cannot see how they can compete in this space anymore.

If you are looking for a long term day trading platform and learning code to automate your trades then eSignal is not the right decision. 

What are Interactive Brokers fees? And what about IB margin rates and commissions?

Interactive Brokers fees and margin rates are one of the most discussed aspects of this trading platform and brokerage. While other Interactive Brokers reviews provide just the basic information about IB fees, Quant Savvy gives a breakdown of various costs and compares Interactive Brokers with other trading platforms.

TradeStation fees are one of its many advantages. In our previous blog post 'Algorithmic Trading Software Review' we've compared TradeStation with NinjaTrader and Multicharts. Either there or here, TradeStation reviews highlight its very low commissions, access to numerous markets, free software, and free historical one-minute data.

AmiBroker is not a broker

eSignal is not a broker

Quant Savvy has released the first NinjaTrader review in 2018, where we've compared NinjaTrader vs TradeStation vs MultiCharts. Since then, NinjaTrader has released multiple updates that we discuss in this NinjatRader review. However, NinjaTrader fees and commissions did not see massive changes in the past two years.