What Would Be Considered The Best Trading Platform In The Industry?

[aoglobalent]

Dear Quant’s,

I would first like to first start out by introducing myself as aoglobalent. This is my first post and thus far I have found QuantNetwork very informative. I look forward to sharing/learning with you all in the future.

I have several questions which pertain to the topic of, "What is the best trading platform in the Industry";

• What is considered the “Best” trading platform right now in the Industry?
• Are there any open source trading platforms that might be considered “The Best” and noteworthy to look into?
• What OS would one recommend for either of the trading platforms in either open source or non-open source?

I thank you all for your time and consideration and look forward to your responce(s).


Kind Regards,



AOGLOBALENT

 

[alain]

what do you mean by "best" trading platform? a program to trade? a system that includes market data, PnL, etc?

 

[aoglobalent]

A Program for trade that includes all the "Bell's and Whistles" such as PL, charts, data, etc... In addition, trades the most markets, such as equities, futures, bonds, credit derivatives, etc... The most all inclusive trading software out there that would be considered the "Best".

 

[alain]

any software like that needs to connect to some broker dealer or market. I don't know if an open source software will be able to connect to a broker dealer or a market since you will have to pay their fees and few of them offer an API to connect.

Trading platforms are usually built in house or they are offered by the different counterparties.

 

[quirkfee]

I've heard great things about the software produced by Interactive Brokers (http://www.interactivebrokers.com) and ThinkOrSwim (http://www.thinkorswim.com/tos/client/index.jsp). ToS is a regular favorite of Barron's.

EliteTrader also has a boatload of reviews of trading platforms out there: Software

 

[alain]

all those platforms are tied to a specific broker dealer with different fee structures. So there isn't a "BEST" platform. It all depends on which asset class you want to concentrate, which features are you looking for, etc.

For individual investors, Thinkorswim only let you trade options. The IB platform is good because they give you a robust API. Tradestation is the complete package but some other quirks (like your strategy resides on their server). MB Trading also gives you an API but the asset classes are limited. Fidelity has WealthLab as platform, etc, etc.

As you can see there might be a "Best" platform from the software standpoint but if I'm a broker dealer either you trade using my platform or take your business elsewhere.

 

[aoglobalent]

Thank you guys for your responces. One of the sites was very good and I will look into it more. As for the OS you would consider the best to operate on?

 

[alain]

OS doesn't matter. Trading comes to how can I make the most money and which tool would allow me to do it. I don't care if it runs on Windows, UNIX, Linux flavor of the day, Mac OS, BeOS or some obscure form of USCD Pascal p-system.

When you worry about the OS, you are looking at the problem from the wrong point of view.

 

[aoglobalent]

Alain,

Thank you sir, I kindly appreciate your help. I will take your point to heart and begin to view things hopefully differently. Me reason for asking was because my only experience with an OS has been MS and thus I have been limited in my knowledge of the OS world outside of MS. So, my rational was not to only see what was the “best” but to find out if my MS world is soon to be shattered, lol!



AOGLOBALENT

 

[Adam G]

I use Interactive Brokers and have been pretty pleased with them so far. Their commisions are cheap cheap cheap! Their Trader Workstation is written in Java, so you can pretty much run it on any OS you want... Windows, OS X, Linux, Irix, etc. Also, you can write programs that tie into the Trader Workstation. Again, this can be done in Java, C#, VB.NET, etc. The only thing is that you have to meet their $10,000 account minimum. I got in when it was still $5,000.

 

[Prashant]

OpentQuant or QuantHouse

OpenQuant is a retail development environment, patterned after the Visual Studio development environment.

It comes ready made to pull realtime and historical data from Yahoo, IB, Esignal with an api for allowing you to create your own marketdata feed handlers.

It also has fix based ready made connections with IB and Genesis and MB Trading. Again with an api for creating a connection with your own broker.

The code is written in C#.

QuantHouse is the professional version with more flexibility and analysis functionality.

I have developed, and seen many custom trading platforms and they are all an effort to setup. Open quant seems to have the infrastructure needed in order to host a variety of trading strategies.

I have only played around with open quant and their trading simulators for their trial period but was easily able to pull in real time market data from esignal and historical from yahoo for the one hundred indian stocks which I follow.

I would suggest you look at the 30 day trial if you are not looking to reinvent the wheel and you can program in C#.

 

[alain]

I don't know if the original poster is looking for a Trade platform for himself or a trading platform that is used in the institutional world. QuantHouse seems like something to take a look at but it is really expensive.