This is the 2nd time I attempted to use it. The first time I saw it I was very disappointed. Especially after using the charts. With so many other choices out there I can't see how they expect to compete. I haven't chosen a broker yet but other than being an ECN why should I bother fiddling around with an inefficient platform? The 2nd time around I started it and it ran for awhile and quit. Not only that it is slow to load. Having some knowledge of programming if I had the support I could probably build a better interface myself. What a joke man and a waste of my time. I've heard good things about them as a broker. What a disappointment. At first I thought it was me and maybe I need to put some more time into it but no not this time around. I went though training to build Microsoft Programs in Visual Basic 6.0 and it's definetly not me. You can look on the web. I wrote an article for professor smiley's class on how to use the ADO data control. This program sucks. It's not user friendly and it's slow. The features suck! You can't customize it. It's dung!
Here's another one.. An ECN.. IB.. What an ugly interface. It looks like a freaking level 2 quote screen. What a joke. Don't these programmers have any brains? Aren't they in the business? All they have to do is look around and copy the better features. Seriously these people are lame. They shouldn't be at the top of the business if there not the best. IB is terrible. I wanted to place a demo order for GBP/JPY because that is what I want to trade. I don't know their symbols (IB's) so I go to there search feature from the demo to look up symbol because the symbol GBP/JPY doesn't work and it opens up the page in my web browser on a pop up which takes forever to load compared to normal pages - that's after I looked manually from the platform where it says look up symbol. It is not user friendly at all. I have dsl it should'nt take that long. I mean what a shitty design. These programmers obviously don't walk though their programs and make them user friendly. I don't know how they got such high ratings. These ECN's are about 5 yrs behind in the times and their user friendliness is about 7 yrs+ behind the times. This is bunk! Forex traders must be lame to give software awards to IB and MBT and accept outdated features. Jeez I demand a lot more in performance than this. Sorry but these are low standards you can forget me as a client. IB is so dumb they write Demo across the screen. Like I don't know I opened a demo session when I started out. You don't put demo in a visual area even if it is a demo. If you really wanted to you could put it in the title area but seriously how stupid. Personally I want to see what I'm doing and especially on a first impression - this is not impressive. If I don't know the symbol there should be a drop down list (idiots!) that I can just pick from the difference categories (ie forex, commodieties, equities and so on) not switch to their website.. They could provide the data into the program it shouldn't be an extra step out of a lazy design to leave the program. I could go on and on about the bull shit but all this should be done in a different programing stage which is called beta testing not on clients. These are all easy features to foresee if they were serious about building professional programs.
I can't imagine anyone giving praise to IB's front end, but their executions are excellent and product availability beats all in the retail space.
I also emailed IB to ask some questions about their product when I 1st got the demo. They never responded to simple straight forward questions. These are major minuses and so far a fail. I give IB an F and MBT a D so far and that's only because I didn't ask them any questions for them to get lower. I don't need any more explanations though after seeing their demo I get the impression. I'm not new to software design and as a potential client I expect the red carpet.
Ok.. I'm glad I got that off my chest. This is frustrating. I guess there's no pay for platforms with charting you can purchase that work with ECN's? I guess since they are incompetent programmers I can pay for a product and have it patched into their system. I'm sure they can at least do that no? Seriously when I trained as a programmer I took great pride in the little details. That is why you become a programmer. You have a love for coding and to make it a desirable program for the user. These are'nt military programs written in ada. Too bad Stockcharts.com isn't in the futures charting business / frontend for ECN's.
Has anyone used Buttontrader with IB for forex trading? If it works as well for this as it does for stocks and futures, it's probably a good upgrade to the TWS, even with their Fxtrader frontend.
Yeah, it works well. I run yen-crosses in IdealPro and CME futures. BT inverts the futures so pricing conforms.
I'm still testing demos. For kicks and comparison I'm loading IB again. You know it takes the longest out of all demos to load nearly 5 minutes. It even gives estimated time that's how I know. I have 1.5 mbps DSL. Not lighting fast but every program I run usually takes only a few seconds at most a minute. I wouldn't think it would take that long to load or is this only in the demo? With money at stake IB users must be pulling out their hair trying to jump on if you have to reload your computer for some reason and run the trading screen.
I click the chart button to load a chart and to mean it seems like it should just pop right open but it seemed to hang up the first time opening. This isn't even loading a chart but to input what chart you want to load. Again you have no options available if you don't know that exact name of the symbol. To get a chart without knowing the symbol for a contract you have to click lookup from the demo which brings up a pop up browser window outside of the demo. Then you have to search though 100s of securities. So if you don't know exactly what your looking for this is cumbersome. Personally I like just putting in a world like crude or USD and it should give me what I'm looking for. So for simplicity sake I looked under futures chose energy and I'll pick light crude since I have some knowledge of it.. whoopee... CL is the symbol. I was able to pull up a very ugly non functioning chart of crude oil. It annoyingly has a pop up message everytime you choose something that data is limited to 2 weeks. Mind you I'm in a 2 week chart. Ok that makes alot of sense. Now I went to ad to indicators and nothing they do not show up. Well crap now I'm going to look at some other demos since this is a joke. ECN's must think they could put garbage out because there's not many of them. It's ridiculous that they can't make a better front end. All they need is the data feed so there's no reason they can't make something like this work.