ThinkOrSwim

My market orders mostly get filled very quickly, but there have been times when they can take up to 5-10 seconds. I'm not sure if they're playing games with me sometimes trying to wait until the market moves to a better place for them or there is just a flood of orders at the time and I have to wait to get filled. This past Friday a market order did that about 4 p.m: it kept moving in my favor though then closed, so it seems to be some type of illiquidity or flooding of orders at that level that takes time to submit.

Regardless, it does have me worried slightly which is why I have my stops tight. I will probably end up trying out various brokers and see which ones I get the best prices and most sane fills at, seeing as it is a crucial part of this business model of buying and selling for a fee.

What is the execution type? If market, then it is not surprising.

My last three stop market orders had at least 10 seconds of slippage. It was on AUD/USD and USD/JPY.

This can't be normal? I wouldn't recommend TOS due to this.

I like setting market stop orders due to the chance that a stop limit might not get executed.

Surely there is a broker that fills stop market orders quickly?

I think you'd better go to ECN-broker

I have been trading options through TOS for several years now and their performance has been acceptable...As my interest in FX grew I thought it handy that TOS offered this. It has been nothing but a disappointment with glitchy software,bad fills, missing orders and poor customer service.Although FX makes up a tiny percentage of my trading, they pissed me off to such an extent I moved to IB whom I think are probably the best ''under one roof'' outfit.

Yeah, their FX business reaaaly needs to be improved.

I've been with thinkorswim since the beginning of the year.

I switched over from Oanda and am very happy overall.

Their futures costs are a bit high, but their fx spreads are fair and the feed is stable.

They've updated the platform with a literal buttload of indicators and you can find many custom scripts on the web.

I trade on a Mac.

Also, I will say that from time to time the price feed can be goofy. Oanda can be the same way.

I was badly slipped on a close and I simply pulled up the built in chat client with the trade desk and told them what had happened. Within 5-6 minutes they had refunded my account $72.00. No hassles. Very polite. They apologized and fixed it licketly split.

Do most of you use it for intraday trading? How would TOS fare with position trading with trades lasting more than a day and up to a week or more?

Trying to figure out TOS's FOREX commission policy and I see they charge $1 as a MINIMUM charge, no matter the size of the trade, PLUS $0.1 per $1000 units traded (i.e. $10 per 100k UNITS).


Is that true or I am missing something? Isn't it way too much?

And Non-commision plan does not allow trades smaller than $10,000 ?

Real and Live account holders feedback would be much appreciated. Thank you!



Plamen

I don't believe their commission forex scheme is as good as just paying the pip spread, but not 100%.

Also, part of the apparent slippage that you occasionally seemingly see is actually just a lagging software function of not seeing your trade stopped out immediately on the charts (the same thing happens at Oanda sometimes). However, when you check via your transaction history of what price the stop took hold at, it is usually somewhat decent.

I trade with Oanda's FX Trade now but use TOS charting, I like this setup a bit better. I still use TOS for options and such.

TOS forex would be fine for longer term traders.

I have a lot of TOS charts posted on my trading journal (see my sig. link) if anyone wants to take a look, and links to a couple custom TOS indicators I use.

can I trade stocks, futures ,options and forex in a single account ?

Yep, just need to get approved for it all. Interactive Brokers I heard is a bit better for this all-in-one, but I heard their minimum deposit is $10k. When I opened mine at TOS, it was $3.5k. Not sure about either of them now.

I've been with TOS for over a year now. In the picture I've attached you can see at 11:09 the chart stopped printing candles until 11:22. Leaving a 40 pip gap, I should mention that the quotes were frozen as well so you have no idea what the actual price is until it starts working again. The platform itself doesn't crash though, just no feed. This has happened to me more than a few times. Everything from crude oil to currencies.

I've brought it up to their help desk numerous times and I get a response of oh they'll have those candles put into the chart by tomorrow. Nothing about fixing the problem of a random crash. Also the help desk people are rarely helpful and pretty ignorant to trading and their platform.

Also like others here have watched market orders hang for 5+ seconds for no reason. Plenty of slippage. Their news feed is a joke, they think their 30 second lagging cnbc video feed is pretty awesome though.

Their platform is free so you get what you pay for. It's not a good broker for forex. Options from what I can tell they actually have gotten right.

It's pretty disheartening when every day you go to log into your account and a new patch/update is needed. Not stable, not worth it.

Does anyone understand their FX commission policy???

I just started an account with them for options and decided to try some forex trades. I really cant tell what my margin level is with forex. They provide no option in the buy or sell window for setting the margin (100:1, 50:1, 20:1 ect..) and they dont offer any details about standard margin allowed for new accounts in thier help section or on their website info.

I have much of my funds in IRA so only certain amounts are available for forex. I had $1000 in the available cash and tried to trade a 10,000 lot of EUR/USD. The trade was rejected due to my available cash being -$250 if I had been filled?? As far as I can tell my forex margin could be 10:1 after looking at the trade rejection but there is no way to make changes in the margin when trading with TOS.

Anyway, needing more than $1000 dollars per trade for a mini lot and the fact that 1 pip equals $1 profit trading a mini...I would need to book 100 pips at LEAST per day to even earn poverty level income??? 100 pips ???

I could take the same $1000 down to the local farmers market and fill my trunk with melons to sell to the tourists and make 5 times what I would earn trading pips on the mini with TOS

Horrible support for Spot FX.
I have had instances where my positions were closed for no rhyme or reason, on asking support was referred to call a number.
Other than this at the rollover point, sometimes position size is shown as double. Again horrible if you are at the terminal.

For options/stocks etc they are good.

Would not suggest ToS for Spot FX.

That post gives me an idea. I have traded futures with them and it was not really too bad, they seem ok with futures,

I think I will trade a few contracts of forex futures on the EUR/USD and see if that might be a better alternative. I have been thinking of the forex futures alternative and have heard pretty good things about it. And I do know what margin level I traded with on ToS futures and know about the futures interface etc...

I will report the results here since this is a ToS thread anyway.

By the way- Can anyone offer a link to a FF forex futures forum or thread?

I am switching from Oanda to TD Ameritrade. So far I love TOS. Everything seems great. It is way more deep and advanced than fxtrade. I am also planing to trade stocks.
Two things I don't like is that you need to be approved to trade forex, and their commissions/fees/spreads are kinda weird. You need to trade in 10,000 increment to not have commission, and if you want to trade 15,000 I believe you have to pay $1.5 in commission? And spread are much lower in commission, so that pretty much balances it out. I have only done the papermoney for a day, but when i started to trade forex 4 months ago , I started with TOS papermoney for a week then switched to Oanda. Now I am going back. As far as I can tell from yesterday, the TOS seems more stable and faster execution times then TOS from 4 months ago.


EDIT: Also I thought the max leverage in USA was 50:1, the Papermoney account I am using now has 100:1 leverage, why?

Okay so going to second that query about it being horrible.. why? Can you provide a few details..