broke - tradestation?

Hello everyone,

Tradestation securities, tradestation.com is now offering forex on their platform. Trade 10 lots a month and no platform fees.

Commission is like an ECN, $2.67 for 100k of eurousd per buy and per sell.

Spread is supposed to be like an ECN, tight 1.5 pip on eurousd or better... apparently it is cleared by GAIN capital, so I am not sure if it's ECN or trading against GAIN.

Best of all, the company is publicly traded and has a lot of financial scrutiny, sox compliance, and sec filing compliance.

After being burned by fxlq, somehow, this seems like a better place to go.

Going to signup and check out their platform. Anyone experienced tradestation with forex?

1.5 pip and €$ is not what you can get on an ECN...

With ECN like or ECN you should have less than .5 pips on €$

forexedge I'm in the same camp as you. Ive switched to TradeStation, however I trade mini-lots.. and the spread will suck that way. In order to get the 100-160$/month free you need to make 100 mini-lot round-trips, which is impossible for any "serious" forex trader making 1-2 minilot trades. (you don't make 50+ trades / month most likely)

My best advise to you is.. drop your forex "dreams" and open an account with interactive brokers. Get yourself a nice diversified ETF like portfolio, and leverage it up somewhat so you got like 15-20% return with 20% StDev & ~25% MaxDD. This way you'll not be bothered by the difficulties of forex trading, and still have a nice return. (and plenty of extra time on your hands)
Oh and if you'd feel like trading Forex, you still can with IB and at really competitive spreads+commission.. just trade a small portion of your total portfolio! It might even help with diversification and better risk-adjusted return.

good luck, I hope the FXLQ case will be solved in the best interest of the customers.

I use TradeStation as both a platform and a broker and I've go no major complaints. I use them for stocks, options, and forex. The forex commissions are 0.2 pips/trade for standard lots and 0.25 for minis.

Over the past couple of years spreads have narrowed on all platforms to the point where we are usually talking about fractions of pips difference. To me, there are more important things in trading then being able to say you have the lowest spread. A few of these are:

 

1. Good data
2. Fast execution
3. % time online
4. Multiple regulatory agency oversight
5. Publicly traded company (symbol - TRAD)
6. Sufficient reserve capital
7. Good support
8. Programmable
9. Automation
10. Backtesting
11. Account Reporting