So against my better judgment, I gave these guys a chance. When I talked to the salesperson, suddenly discounts and free resets were offered when I wasn’t quite sold on the process. I have no idea what changed my mind, perhaps it is because I am growing increasingly bored doing technical analysis. (My name is Christopher Lewis, I am a technical analysis for several Forex and futures websites around the world, as well as other private enterprises.) The problem I ran into wasn’t so much the market. Stock markets are relatively easy to trade in comparison to futures and Forex, or at least that has been my experience. My biggest problem of course is funding, which is the biggest problem for most traders. With that in mind, I thought I would give the stock market day trading game a try. I have had really good results, which makes sense considering so many of the markets that the usual brain-dead Wall Street trader trades move in lockstep. That being said, it’s not like I did have some losses but overall I was relatively profitable. Against that backdrop though, I have had to take advantage of and offered refund. I started trading last week and have been on the phone with technical support every day. With the Haywood Trader platform, I have had nothing but issues. I’m not exactly sure what Chris in technical support was talking about, but he made it sound like somehow they were related to Haywood Trader. Regardless, it’s the only platform you can use. This is probably the worst platform I have ever used, and full of so many bugs it isn’t even funny. Some of the highlights include: when I initially got the platform, it was sent to me as a zip file. You can’t at this point downloaded from the website, because it will run on Windows. There is some type of major issue with development, and therefore you have to use it as a “portable” version. They were working on that all four days that I had been trading with them. Some of the other highlights will include: chart simply don’t update right along with price. This is an on and off situation, and you never really know when it’s going to hit. While that’s not a major problem for somebody who uses nothing but price ladders, those of us who are more visually inclined, it’s a huge problem. Another fun part of the platform is that sometimes orders disappear, or my personal favorite: when you try to add to a position it will simply flatten out your position, perhaps even two or three dollars below current price. During the Thursday session, I had bought the SPY ETF, close the position, and wanted to reenter a bit later. However I suddenly couldn’t do it again because I had reached my position limit. Upon inspection, I realized that a previous order hadn’t been closed, which of course is my fault, but here’s the kicker: it wouldn’t let me. When I called Chris in technical support, he said that the order was closed and it was an actually active. As far as it being stuck in my platform, well there’s not a lot that can be done about that evidently. Now that I have applied for the refund, we will see if they honor that. I will update you, because quite frankly traders need to be on top of situations like this. If they refund my money, then I will write this off as simply a shop that is stuck with bad software. If that’s the case, then I wish them well but recognize that this type of problem can’t be a regular occurrence if it’s dealing with real money. I understand that it is a simulated account at the moment, so it can always be figured out later. In fact, I had to wipe out the first couple of days of profits due to a completely unrelated issue to what was mentioned before. They did in fact reset the entire account, so at that point I was ready to let the whole thing go. However, as it’s another day and another new problem, I simply can’t get past it. This was after downloading the newest version directly from Haywood trader.com, and having technical support walk me through the entire thing. I will say this, Chris was very helpful. However, I suspect that he has had this problem on a relay basis as I can hear the exasperation in his voice. I WILL UPDATE THIS THREAD. If I get ripped off, it’s the least I can do in order to save some other people. I also won’t hesitate to flame them and the most visible way possible. Here’s to hoping.
I think you should get your money back ... if it was me, I would never fund someone who complains about "minor" technical issues right off the start. Granted, everyone has different tolerance levels for these things, but you are not even risking your own money.
So after talking to them, they offered me a couple of days of free trial with the understanding that I can get my money back if the technology doesn’t work out. It turns out that they are in the process of debugging the latest platform update, which seems to be somewhat tricky. They are also in the process of updating the backend, which has a lot to do with limit and stop orders causing issues. Technical support walk through the platform with me, and in a strange turn of events it turns out that the pop up box that confirms whether you want to place an order or not somehow has kicked off a bug with filling the orders correctly. That being said, I have agreed to give them a couple more days of running the plan through its paces. Oddly, since I have turned off the pop-up notification, I have seen absolutely no problems with any of the order fills. I suspect part of their problem is with the data provider, quote media as far as charting is concerned. I can’t verify that but it seems to be that charting issues run through there. It doesn’t really matter to me, because I use my motive wave charts using a live feed from TD Ameritrade anyway. (This is just because I prefer the charting package at motive wave.) While I have agreed to give them a couple more days, I will have to let you know whether I have chosen to stay. So far, so good. The one thing that I can say is both people I have dealt with through the company have bent over backwards to help. Hopefully that’s a good sign of things to come. So far 99.99% of my issues have all been technology related.
I have an account from them....however, its been empty for ages. Once you have traded, they keep the data up for you.
@MotiveWave, I don't see TDAmeritrade In the data list, but I do see in brokers list. Can you please comment? If I have TDAmeritrade account, can I use it to feed MotiveWave?