I agree with many that TS is a piece of crap. But in world filled with junk, their crap is slightly better than most. Their customer service is the exact opposite of TOS. TS is also unapologetic and will look to blame you for everything. Nothing is ever their fault. Even when their stop server goes down in the middle of a trade. Btw, if that happens you are shit out of Luck.

In regard to their platform, the beauty is that they have impeccable data and their system is tightly integrated for the people who don’t want to have a seperate charting package, data provider and broker.

However, the architecture of the platform is piss poor. You cannot mix timeframes. Which means all your scans and auto trades have to be confined to signals from one time frame. Now you could do it if you are adventurous but it takes way too much effort and you need to duplicate a lot of your work. Thus at the end it’s not clean and could result in a lot of issues.

Amibroker, Seirra, Ninja Trader and Neoticker are much better but they all suffer integration issues. But, if you ever decide to leave TS, you work pretty much will go down the drain as you will not be able to access the platform or your custom code unless you choose to pay them $100 a month.

Other issues:

- TS does not give you a good rate on your money. IB gives close to 4.25% I think.

- You have a lot of slippage issues in TS on thick stocks.

- Backtesting on it tedious. no portfolio back testing without buying some crappy add on.

- No tick replay. Great for traders who want to practice the day over again.

I started with think or swim. However, I became quickly frustrated with their data service. Things that I took for granted with TS were tough in TOS. They have great customer service and the fills are pretty good. However, their data was unreliable and the scanning was below subpar. At the time they did not have TI integration. However, you can bargain them down to .08 cents a share per side.

I would strongly recommend a back up data package to overcome the missing data and spike. I hope they improved this aspect of their platform. But this is coming from guy that has never been satisfied. So I finally moved from TS to a Neoticker, IB & eSignal configuration. My scans are much better than Trade Ideas and far far more targeted. However TI does have their scans sitting on their servers which is pretty unbeatable and you don’t have to code the scans in.

Good trading.

~ Keith

As far as some of your questions go:

They do hold their stops and alerts on their server. I’m still not completely satisfied with their list of stocks to short. Oh well, no broker is perfect.

Before joining TOS, I too was like you (in the fact that I never cared about options), but I figure it can’t hurt to learn about them, especially with the Wednesday afternoon seminars they have.

But by happenstance I just looked at it and he has recently issued a sell, as of 1/6/08. (He’s also moved to his boat and is sailing around the world.)

It’s his first sell signal in more than four and a half years.

-Mike O’Connor

Formerly ADD Trader

I can’t tell you how disappointed I have been with the switch from CT to SS Pro. I left SS Pro over a year ago to go with CT, and I truly believed that they would move most, if not all of the funtionality of CT over to SS Pro. But within 5 min of using SS Pro again, after the transition, I knew they had done nothing. It is almost like they specifically tried not to carry over any of the features that day traders need most. They are promising that changes are on the way, but I doubt it.

I am contemplating going with IB, as I have heard good things about them, and like the idea of being able to trade stocks, options, foreign stocks, currenciies, and commodities in one place (not that I trade the last three yet, but who knows…)

You are a computer guy, is it really so hard for someone to create an intuitive platform that has features traders need? I think I could give 10 suggestions right off the top of my head that I don’t see with any brokers.

Formly ADD Trader