TradeStation 9 has the ability to have any type of ticks, minutes, days, weeks, and months. They don't have second based charts. When I traded with NeoTicker and eSignal that was available.
As for historical data, I think it depends on what you try. It seems that my tick charts can go back 6 months. If you request very small tickframes (like 21 tick) and go far enough back in time, the charts will get bogged down, and if you don't have enough memory a chart with enough ticks will not show up. For example, I tried requesting 1 tick charts on the ES mini index contract. After about five days of that data my chart would not populate - there was just too much data and my PC was overwhelmed.
With minutes, you can do quite a bit. I prefer 1440 minute charts over the daily bars. This overcomes an issue I couldn't figure out with MT4 (although maybe there is a solution), about counting Sunday as a day. In reality a true forex week is five - 24 hour periods composed of 1440 minutes each. I happen to use a 30 period SMA on daily bars as part of my trading strategy, and on MT4 you get extra bars. With TradeStation you can quickly define what a session is, and configure what a day is. I've been able to pull up 1440 minute charts going back two years. However, with daily bars go back many years.
As for me, I don't have anything to do with TradeStation, and in fact been trading off and on with them since 2004. They've done a lot of things to make me pretty unhappy along the way, but this time they got it right. It now stands as about the best forex trading platform/broker I've used so far.
I've used MT4 with IBFX, Oanda, Gain, FXDD, not to mention GFT and MBTtrading. The closest I've been to ECN trading was with PFGBest and eSignal. There, I was autotrading AUD/USD with NeuroShell. Had to pay commissions, but got nice fills. I in fact was on the beta test trader for FXDD when they switched from MT3 to MT4. I'm a trader that's been around for a while just never felt the need to contribute until now.
-harvester
As for historical data, I think it depends on what you try. It seems that my tick charts can go back 6 months. If you request very small tickframes (like 21 tick) and go far enough back in time, the charts will get bogged down, and if you don't have enough memory a chart with enough ticks will not show up. For example, I tried requesting 1 tick charts on the ES mini index contract. After about five days of that data my chart would not populate - there was just too much data and my PC was overwhelmed.
With minutes, you can do quite a bit. I prefer 1440 minute charts over the daily bars. This overcomes an issue I couldn't figure out with MT4 (although maybe there is a solution), about counting Sunday as a day. In reality a true forex week is five - 24 hour periods composed of 1440 minutes each. I happen to use a 30 period SMA on daily bars as part of my trading strategy, and on MT4 you get extra bars. With TradeStation you can quickly define what a session is, and configure what a day is. I've been able to pull up 1440 minute charts going back two years. However, with daily bars go back many years.
As for me, I don't have anything to do with TradeStation, and in fact been trading off and on with them since 2004. They've done a lot of things to make me pretty unhappy along the way, but this time they got it right. It now stands as about the best forex trading platform/broker I've used so far.
I've used MT4 with IBFX, Oanda, Gain, FXDD, not to mention GFT and MBTtrading. The closest I've been to ECN trading was with PFGBest and eSignal. There, I was autotrading AUD/USD with NeuroShell. Had to pay commissions, but got nice fills. I in fact was on the beta test trader for FXDD when they switched from MT3 to MT4. I'm a trader that's been around for a while just never felt the need to contribute until now.
-harvester