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by dhruvkar
3952 days ago
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Non-algorithmic trading Optionshouse.com is great, for both stocks and options, commissions-wise. Not as good for lightweight, realtime charts.
I use OptionsXpress for that purpose. Optionsxpress has high commissions, so I only use the charts, which are superior.
Put in $100 bucks and it'll give you full access to the trading tools. Algorithmic Trading I use T4 for day-trading futures. I think it has APIs for C#. But no stock/options, only Futures. Edit: T4 API link http://www.ctsfutures.com/wiki/T4%20API%2040.MainPage.ashx |
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1) Flash platform that randomly crashes after being open for extended periods of time (eg. more than an hour). I've even seen the prices stop updating after a while.
2) Often appends a bunch of 0s after the decimal to the price of your order, forcing you to manually remove them in order to place the trade
3) This morning the platform was extremely slow, and I was unable to load pricing data into the charts. I tried to submit a ticket to customer support, but the server was down. I didn't try to submit any trades, but for all I know that may have been down as well. Keep in mind this morning the S&P 500 was down 10%. Nice to know my trading platform will crap out on me when I most need it
4) UI sucks and is confusing. When specifying how many shares you want to buy, you're not told on the same dialog how much total that would cost. The charts suck and are confusing to work with.
5) One day I submitted a sell order, and it ended up buying. Although I was convinced the platform screwed up my order, I gave OptionsHouse the benefit of the doubt and figured I must've made a careless mistake. Then later in the day I attempted to sell again, only to have the platform issue a buy order again and give me more or the stock I was trying to sell. At this point it was clear the platform fucked up my order, so I called OptionsHouse. They basically just told me to use an alternative method in the platform to close out my stock (clicking the Close/Adjust button).
During my call about #5, I mentioned issue #2 (it had been months after I submitted a ticket for it). They told me it was a known issue that they were working on. How long does it take to fix a bunch of trailing zeros after the decimal being appended to your order? Do they even have a dev team? The fact that it's been months and they still haven't solved such a simple yet incredibly annoying bug gives me absolutely no confidence in the future of their platform.
I'm going to transfer all my funds out, probably to IB or RobinHood. This morning was the last straw. Having the platform down when the S&P is down 10% is unacceptable. OptionsHouse used to have the lowest commission fees, but that's not longer the case with RobinHood (although of course you don't get nice things like options trading and a web platform).