
Ask HN: What's a good real-time stock trading platform? - tradinup
I was just wondering what you all would recommend for doing real-time stock trading online for an individual investor?
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chollida1
You really haven't specked out the question very well.

Do you mean algorithmic or just the ability to post orders?

Not sure what you mean by online. If you mean web based or mobile? Or is
desktop fine?

Robin Hood isn't bad if you just want point and click.

If you want to do something algorithmic then use Interactive brokers.

You might find something better but IB has been around for ever and probably
wont' get out of this business any time soon. I can't say the same for any
other broker that a retail investor can use.

Having said all of that, I would really, strongly, emphatically advise against
trying your hand at algorithmic trading.

For the average person the rule they should internalize is Investing good,
algo trading bad.... and this is comming from one of the people who benefits
when the average person tries to trade in the stock market.

~~~
Galanwe
Been working in the hedge fund industry for a while now. I confirm that 90% if
people I know that do serious personnal trading use Interactive Broker (IB).
It's just the de facto solution.

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e15ctr0n
Barron's Magazine does a comparative study of online brokers every year and
recommends the best based on your needs. This is the one for 2015 in which
Interactive Brokers comes out at the top:

[http://www.barrons.com/articles/SB51367578116875004693704580...](http://www.barrons.com/articles/SB51367578116875004693704580502703510707706)

This is the methodology used for the ranking:

[http://www.barrons.com/articles/SB51367578116875004693704580...](http://www.barrons.com/articles/SB51367578116875004693704580502730821853148)

This is a comparative table where each broker's offerings are broken down and
analyzed:

[http://www.barrons.com/articles/SB51367578116875004693704580...](http://www.barrons.com/articles/SB51367578116875004693704580500193983582362)

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morgante
Interactive Brokers is probably the best option for retail investors. They
have extremely low commissions and pretty advanced access (including API
access).

Keep in kind that their product isn't designed for "novice" retail investors.
There is a $10k minimum and the trade stations have a learning curve.

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hazard
It depends on what you want. As others have pointed out, IB is good for a
near-pro trading experience. If you don't need margin access, shorting,
options, etc you might want to check out Robinhood (disclaimer: I've never
used it although it looks nice).

Really though, why do you care about real-time trading anyways? Not being
sarcastic; this is an actual question.

~~~
basseq
I found Robinhood to be useless. Not enough research/discovery tools to do
anything other than "buy a specific stock". I also felt like my orders'
fulfilled prices were wildly different than quote ticks—to the tune of a 100+
BP (front-running algos?).

~~~
dguaraglia
Ah, that bullshit! I think you stumbled on the way Robinhood makes money.

When I first joined the Android beta Robinhood had a very clear message before
every purchase: "to protect the user from volatility, Robinhood creates market
orders as limit orders with a 5% higher price". So, yeah, that means that if
you place your market order at $100, they reserve the right to broker it all
the way to $105, which is bullshit. On average it won't be that high, but
still, if you were planning to make a 0.5% profit, you'll always lose.

The only way to get around that is by creating a proper limit order yourself,
setting the price a couple cents the current price (to match the BP you are
willing to give up.)

Since I started doing that, things became way more predictable.

~~~
basseq
Total BS. I'm a big fan of limit orders (though most of my purchases are DCA).
Since Robinhood can't do limit orders (or couldn't when I was using it—or I
couldn't figure it out), it's useless.

~~~
dguaraglia
You can do limit orders now! The interface is still kind of clunky, but it
works well enough for my use case. Still, I haven't used Robinhood for
anything but short term speculation, as a toy.

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ams6110
Here's an algorithm that should work well for most casual investors:

At 2:00EST [daily|weekly|monthly], buy N shares of SPY.

~~~
mizzao
For a little more diversification, I would amend that to buying shares of ITOT
and IXUS in a 3:2 ratio (60% domestic/40% foreign), without paying commission
if possible (e.g.
[https://www.fidelity.com/etfs/ishares](https://www.fidelity.com/etfs/ishares)).

Once you are comfortable with that, just rebalance this portfolio to the
60%/40% ratio once every year or two
([http://seekingalpha.com/article/2130243-portfolio-
rebalancin...](http://seekingalpha.com/article/2130243-portfolio-rebalancing-
the-whys-and-the-hows)), and start moving toward fixed-income funds as you get
closer to retirement.

------
jayess
I highly recommend TD Ameritrade's Think or Swim platform.

~~~
trey-jones
I have been using Think or Swim since before TD Ameritrade bought them, and
it's pretty great. The charts in my opinion are the best that I've found,
highly customizable, and feature rich.

You can trade all types of securities as well. And it's very easy. The mobile
app is also top notch.

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voiceclonr
Interactive brokers for automatic trading. You would also need to backtest
your algorithms, so depending on the granularity, you would need to shell out
decent bucks. Daily data or minute data is easy - but if you need Tick data,
it gets very expensive (IQFeed is the one I've used in the past). But the most
important question is why ?

The only ones who make money in the market are arbitration traders (HFT types)
or those who just happen to be on the right side of market. As an individual
investor, you will spend lot of time and money to get your systems running -
but market conditions will change dramatically and all your backtest
algorithms will become irrelevant.

------
hybrid11
Quantopian has a really good platform for creating algorithms, back testing
them on historical data, and for performing real time trades.

[https://www.quantopian.com/](https://www.quantopian.com/)

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dhruvkar
_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](http://www.ctsfutures.com/wiki/T4%20API%2040.MainPage.ashx)

~~~
JDiculous
OptionsHouse used to be an amazing discount brokerage, but ever since they
were bought out by TradeKing it's been ruined and I can no longer recommend
it. OptionsHouse's platform has been replaced by TradeKing's terrible flash
platform. Here are some issues I've had over the past 3+ months. I've
submitted tickets to customer support for all of them, but never gotten any
response.

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).

~~~
dhruvkar
Ah. I used thema lot when I was day-trading a couple years ago. Guess they've
really gone downhill since. Only use them to place long term trades now.

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lewisl9029
Interactive Brokers might not be the best option for long-term investors who
are just starting out due to their monthly minimum activity fees.

[https://www.interactivebrokers.com/en/index.php?f=4969&ns=T](https://www.interactivebrokers.com/en/index.php?f=4969&ns=T)

It basically imposes a minimum fee of $10 per month. It does gets waived if
you have more than $100,000 USD in your account though, so this is just
something to keep in mind, and YMMV.

I would personally just go with Robinhood for long term investing. No fees is
better than low fees, and the longer the time frame you're investing, the less
important individual trade execution and customization (areas where IB excels
in) becomes.

RE: Algorithmic trading. Check out Quantopian:

[https://www.quantopian.com/](https://www.quantopian.com/)

------
skhatri11
The biggest problems in investing are (i) when and what do I buy; and (ii)
when do I get out?

Instavest is the only platform to address these issues in a systematic way.

You'll see high quality investments ideas that have been backed by real money.
You can choose to invest in these ideas and have the investment leader notify
you when they sell or you can invest in your own idea and share with it with
the community.

Our equity trades only $3.49 a trade.

~~~
bhickey
> You'll see high quality investments ideas that have been backed by real
> money.

Why should I believe this is something other than wagering on survivor bias?

------
idefine
Tradier.com is another one. They have an API for developers. It's not as
mature as IB, but if you are looking to start/play with something with
no/minimal initial investment check it out -
[https://developer.tradier.com](https://developer.tradier.com)

I know that instavest.com (YC company) is powered by them as well.

------
brentis
May want to try MOMO realtime stock discovery. (Www.mometic.com) Streams highs
and lows to your phone. Not aware of any other app that helps you find stocks
that are breaking out. /still need a trading platform. Has super fast push
alerts too, fwiw.

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cdvonstinkpot
CapitalOne's Sharebuilder platform's the only one I know of which allows the
purchase of fractions of shares.

[https://www.capitaloneinvesting.com/](https://www.capitaloneinvesting.com/)

------
yeureka
I used to work for Stellar Trading Systems some years ago. AFAIK they are
doing very well. They have multiple APIs for algo-trading and the access is
very fast and robust. Definately a professional tool though.

------
nazka
If you trade a lot and you know what you are doing: Interactive Broker.

If you do long term investments and you are learning and/or want a full
package of information and tools: TD Ameritrade and their Thinkorswim
platform.

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stevewepay
I used to use Ninjatrader. It has integrations with a lot of brokers, and you
can write C# algos. The GUI is pretty good the last time I used, it so overall
I would recommend it.

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rokhayakebe
While we are at it. Does anyone know of a random stock trading possibility?
Ideally you would set certain boundaries then let the product randomly trade
without much analysis.

~~~
lifeisstillgood
As the market is a random walk, One would expect to break even minus the cost
of trade - this losing money. It would be at least a validation of your
ability to get the API up etc.

I don't quite understand why the OP wants to do this. Algo trading is mostly
about market making it seems - finding a spread and keeping ones risk as
neutral as possible. I suppose there is always a market to be found - but I
would assume that one would have specific domain knowledge rather than hope to
trip over it.

~~~
olewhalehunter
not necessarily
[http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....](http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0068344)
it's almost as if the market rewards entropy

~~~
lifeisstillgood
I don't quite see that - the conclusion seems to be random strategy is not
significantly better or worse at predicting next day's market than any other
and it is less volatile - seems a good bet.

Great link though thanks

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philippnagel
What would be the best option if one only cares about an API?

~~~
dbettin
If you only care about EOD market data, you can take a look at TagniFi's free
markets API - [https://www.tagnifi.com](https://www.tagnifi.com).

Disclaimer: I am a TagniFi co-founder.

------
fani_pack
[https://tradestation.github.io/webapi-
docs/](https://tradestation.github.io/webapi-docs/)

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brxdy
Like others here, I like Think or Swim by TD Ameritrade.

~~~
vikas5678
Just one problem though, in times of extreme market volatility and volume,
Thinkorswim freezes up. Like today, it was unusable at times.

~~~
brxdy
was that limited to ToS though? Wasn't much liquidity out there

~~~
vikas5678
Interactive Brokers and Tradestation didnt have much issues, but yes, getting
filled on trades, especially options trades was a nightmare.

~~~
tradinup
I was wondering about this, so Interactive Brokers was still pretty solid
during last Mondays market swings?

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jpatel3
Whats the purpose? answer can vary based on that.

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planetjones
Think or Swim. Dough platform is great.

------
cderivan
AmiBroker + IB

