I went live with Tradestation in the British Pound futures on Monday of this week.  I’m still in test mode, trading 1 or 2 contracts at a time, and ensuring that my strategy is properly coded and being executed according to expectations.  Here’s my early list of Tradestation  pros and cons.

 Tradestation pros:

Wonderfully flexible programming environment — within one week of obtaining the Tradestation platform, I was able to get the Cable Glider coded in EasyLanguage and even make an enhancement to the exit strategy that will be difficult to duplicate using MetaTrader.

Ability to run parameter optimization — Lots of system developers are optimization-phobic, due to a fear of overfitting a system to the data.  Smart use of optimization beats the heck out of no optimization any day.  Perhaps Metatrader 4 has some optimization capabilities as well, but I have no experience with these.  All I know is that optimization with Tradestation is great because it’s backtesting SPEED is huge. 

Customizable continuous contract data for backtesting — The ability to cobble together data from individual contracts in various ways is awesome…it’s not so much that I need several different methods, but rather that it’s great to be able to research the different methods and make my own choice rather than accepting whatever one method the platform provides.

Availability of historical data — Tradestation has always been known for it’s large quantity of data for backtesting…they work with GAIN capital on the spot forex side, and that data is available along with equities data too, even though I don’t have a spot forex account or equities account with Tradestation.

Tradestation cons :

Lack of paper trading accounts — Tradestation maintains a vast client-only forum, and it seems to me that folks have been requesting paper trading account capability for at least 4 years and it has not been implemented.  This is a glaring fault, given the fact that many futures brokers offer paper trading accounts and virtually all Forex dealers offer paper trading accounts.

Lack of free platform trial without becoming a brokerage client  — This is kind of tied in with the point above, but I want to add that I avoided Tradestation for years because of the lack of a free trial without funding a brokerage account.  When I finally opened an account and got my hands on the product, I’m considering moving the bulk of my trading activity over to their platform…I can only guess their business would expand greatly if they made a free or low cost trial with paper trading available. 

Now with all that said, I’m still very happy and excited to be using Tradestation…when I discovered Metatrader and the spot forex market, I had a feeling that it was the beginning of a very positive change in my trading career.  I feel the same way today about Tradestation…once the platform and language are learned, the possibilities are limitless.