Elindydotcom, Thank you very much for the time you have taken to post your observations. Much appreciated !
I just opened my new gift from TradeStation....another download for a new Build.....even more nifty stuff on it. Oh I am going to have lots of fun next week!
"I would appreciate any comments on the Tradestation 7.2 platform`(especially from traders who use auto trade function)" Autotrading is useless if you are using limit orders in your strategy. For example say your strategy puts an order to buy NQ at 1420.00 limit. The price comes down, the low is 1420.00 and TS assumes you are filled even though in the real world the ask may not have come down to that price. To compensate for this TS has what they call an "Automatice limit order replacement" which will send a market order to buy if your strategy positions don't match the actual conditions. This means SLIPPAGE. The bottom line is I wouldn't use automated trading if your strategy involves limit orders.
I have been using TradeStation since version 2000i - believe me, version 7, and now version 7.2 is a truly awesome trading platform. I have used IB, Global Futures in the past, but I now stick with TS just because they are so good. With the introduction of the Matrix order entry interface, TradeStation gets stronger and stronger - I know some BIG players who have switched to TS from X-Trader since this addition. Data for TS is now provided directly from the CME and CBOT to TS - there is no intermediary such as comstock, and no 1 second netting of tick data - you just get every tick as it happens. Please note that if your automated strategy is complicated and requires intrabar updating, then you need a decent spec PC to process all this data - I have seen a roughly 50% increase in CPU utilisation since we started getting CME data direct. TS is self contained - you dont need to fiddle around with a seperate data manager or data supplier - you just load up your platform and all the data is there. I have never used Amibroker, and my version of Metastock predates my TS2000i version, so I cannot compare the back tester, but I think other forum users have commented in detail on this function. I personally have had no problems, although optimising and back testing has proved to be an exceedingly lengthy process - though the strategy in question was unusually large and complicated - 2mb easylanguage file! True, TS does not use multithreading for running multiple tests, but I think this is on the cards for future development, although, unless you have a supercomputer, I cannot see the benefit of this since my own optimisations max out my 2ghz P4 CPU. the strategy that I autotraded with TS worked fine - I autotraded from the launch of TS7 when the functionality first became available. the strategy I was using entered the market using market orders and exited using limits. TS operations from the strategy signalling and entry to the fills on market orders are split second fast - and I am trading from the UK - very rarely did it take longer than one second from strategy signal to fill a ten lot on the S&P emini. Note, at present TS manages your stop orders using what they call a "synthetic" stop - this is a stop that is managed on your trading platform until price ticks to your stop price, at which time the TS platform sends it instantly to globex as a market order. This worked fine for me, I had no problem getting fills on my stops and occasionally got positive slippage. The only downside of these synthetic stops are that you dont qualify for daytraders margin since you dont have a working stop in the market. When your strategy fills your entry order using automation, limit orders for targets are sent to globex while price is nearer to your target than it is to your stop. If price retreats from your target, limits are cancelled until price starts heading that way again. The reason TS does this is to preserve your buying power, since working orders in the market absorb available funds. I have autotraded this system on the ES, YM, NQ and EC futures contracts with no grumbles. My only word of caution is that, when using full automation you must have a highly reliable or redundant internet connection, and you must be able to keep an eye on whats happening. I did use to leave the system trading on its own quite a lot - but on a couple of occasions I had problems where limit orders for targets were not fully filled by the market. At this point automation has its difficulties, since the strategy indicates a fill, when TS trademanager doesnt, so autotrading halts until you tell it what you want to do, even if you still have some contracts in the market. There is the option of telling TS to replace unfilled limit orders with market orders after a predetermined time between the strategy showing a fill and the market not - but you need to be prepared for at least 1 tick of extra slippage with this option. I now no longer autotrade, I devote all my time and efforts to scalping the ES intraday in the first two hours of the day. The Matrix is a wonderful tool to do this from, and I cannot recommend TradeStation highly enough - it meets all my needs as a daytrader.
if you can code your strategy into easylanguage, you can get Tradestation to do anything you want. The only minor limitation with TS at the moment, for extremely short time frame trading is that new sets of instructions for orders are only issued at the end of each bar - so if your bar is 75 tick or 1 minute, regardless, instructions to move stops to the next level cannot be issued intra-bar, only at the end of each bar. I beleive this is a design issue that is to be adddressed in an upcoming update.
I very much doubt this would be a limitation for a longer term style trading - TS is very popular with swing traders. The only occasions I have come across this being a problem for traders is for very short term scalpers who are using an automated strategy to scalp a few ticks out of each bar
just curious...i know one can get TS 2000i from a reseller but is the new TS 7.x available to Canadians? Thanks