Interactive Brokers Trader Workstation (Platform Demo & Honest Review) transcript

[Music] in today's episode I'm going to teach you how to day trade using interactive brokers and we're going to be using the trader workstation desktop trading software that they offer if we look at their website you can see they offer a number of different trading platforms and they kind of rank them based on your experience level from beginner to Advanced now I've already done a platform demo and given my honest review of ibkr desktop and I said that at this time it did not score very well on my 0 to 10 RW score because it's just a little bit too basic it doesn't include some of the minimal viable requirements that I have for day trading software so unfortunately it's not something that I would use but their Trader workstation has been around for a lot longer it's very well established and it certainly is being used today by a lot of very successful Traders so this is the platform that we're going to focus on here today now I'll tell you right now I don't have any affiliate relationship with interactive brokers or with any other broker dealer for that matter so what I share with you today is just my genuine opin opion of how I think this platform performs what its strengths are and some of its weaknesses my guess is that by the end of this episode you'll know whether or not Trader workstation will be a good fit for your strategy my name is Ross Cameron I'm a full-time Trader and I turned a small account with less than $600 into more than $10 million of verified and independently audited trading profits now I share that with you not because I want you to ass see my results are typical because they're not but because I want you to know that I have a deep level of experience in the markets I've been Trading tring for a long time in fact I funded my first account in 2001 and I've used dozens of different platforms to I have a unique vantage point to be able to tell you with based on my strategy really what software is going to work really well and help me make the most of the opportunities in the market and what platforms out there are going to be holding me back and are going to really prevent me from potentially even being a profitable training it can be that big of a difference the tool you use is important now of course it's only a bad Carpenter that blims the tool but at the end of the day you want the best tools that you can find and trading is hard enough as it is without using crappy software right let's get real so let's go ahead and jump onto the screen share and I'm going to pull up a slide deck here with uh some of my notes on Trader workstation one of the first things that I want to say is that Trader workstation has a fantastic um system for authentication for secure login this is the trader workstation platform right here in the background but we'll go ahead and pull up this slide deck and I'll just put it on a slideshow so in order to log in to your Trader workstation and this is also true with ibkr desktop you have to do a secure login and you have to uh authenticate your login on the desktop on your mobile app I think this is a fantastic security feature just to prevent someone from you know if someone had your password they could log in on any computer right so even if they have your password they can't get into the computer without that two-step authentication you know a lot of the software out there doesn't currently enforce that and you know when you're talking about your brokerage account and you know potentially a tremendous amount of your life savings in that account you really want that level of security so interactive brokers does a really good job with that security feature so that's the first thing that I'll say um about interactive brokers now when you first sign up to interactive brokers it's a little bit confusing getting yourself um situated with the market data some platforms make it incredibly easy uh which makes sense Weeble just for instance when you first log in here um this will be blank and it'll say there's a button that says subscribe here for Market data you click that button and boom you're jumping right over to subscribe so obviously that is the type of thing that makes it really easy to get yourself connected with Market data and the options are pretty simple with interactive brokers because they're an international broker dealer with customers from really all all around the world they have dozens and dozens of different data feeds and that can be a little bit confusing for a beginner Trader so what I like to use is uh for me it's important to have realtime Market data so I want to make sure I have of course realtime Market data and I want to make sure I have level two data so I chose to subscribe to level two which they're calling deep book data so you subscribe to the level two data and they then you do your user agreements uh it's professional nonprofessional agreements most of us all of us probably are nonprofessional Traders nonprofessional means we don't have a license we're not licensed um and you you would know if you got a license you would only get a license if you worked at a bank or a brokerage firm and it's a license to trade with other people's money and then you'd be a Prof considered a professional Trader and the only reason it matters is because it determines how much you pay in Market data fees that's the only reason professional Traders pay more uh nonprofessional Traders pay less so once you've got your Market data subscriptions you are able to get logged in so now I'm going to walk you through how to create your layout in Trader workstation now if we jump back onto the screen share this is my layout in lighted which is the broker that I use uh as my primary broker for day trading so you'll notice that this has uh four level two windows so these are all depth of Market where I can see all of the orders all of the quotes so that's the level two data and then underneath each level two window I have a small order entry window where I can actually place my orders so I could do I'll click right here I'll just do an order to buy 25 shares boom instantly filled and then I go to sell instantly sold very fast so this is what I use for order execution and you may notice there are no charts here the primary reason I don't use charts at light speed is because their charts are not very good they're very basic um but that's that's okay I have a workaround for that now another platform here that I have is Dash Trader this is a a piece of software that you actually can use with interactive brokers and I'll talk about that later in this episode you can also use it with Charles Schwab uh you can use it with dozens of different Brokers actually it's a software company and they license their software so you can subscribe to it and then people use this software with all these different Brokers so anyways their charts are also really basic so I more or less have the platform set up in the same way so boom just bought 10 shares of Ford so you could see my position window this would be my open orders window and these are the uh the trades that I've taken today and then contrl Z to get out so I'm using hotkeys to buy and sell I'll show you how to use those and create those hotkeys a little bit later now just why not here's a third platform also very similar now this one I set up the charts for but if I was actually using it I did it for the purpose of the demo but if I was using it myself it would be set up uh well I just close the charts out completely so close that chart and close that chart yes and then well I have to kind of rearrange this as it turns out so doesn't matter but I would sort of rearrange that and kind of make it work so that's uh trade station so anyways when we set up uh when I set up a a broker when I start setting up a platform I kind of start from the same place um regardless of which broker it is the first thing I want to make sure I have is my positions window in the top corner now this is kind of interesting because um I was a little bit this you know I mean I guess it's intuitive for probably most people maybe it wasn't for me um but I wasn't thinking about portfolio I was thinking about a positions window but uh portfolio is what they call it so all right whatever it's portfolio window doesn't matter so that's the portfolio window in the top corner right here and then under activity I've got um this orders window right here and then right down here I have a trades window and what I actually learned is that you have to unclick this padlock right here in the Corner unclick that padlock and then you can start moving around these windows and they're all in a grid as you can see kind of in the background so it's a little it's a little Antiquated to how most platforms are kind of set up today um again you know going back to Weeble this you know you want to kind of move this around you can move it around very easily um it just this feels more modern and more what what people are accustomed to using and seeing uh CDT it's just very functional so you know but but I will say their order entry window look at how humongous this is this is a huge order entry window so light speed takes all of that same information and condenses it into a window that's this big real estate is important and Weeble is using a lot of space on that order entry window all right so nonetheless we're back over here um so yes it's a little bit clunky to kind of organize but it's okay so when I first got set up here I um did not have this window open yet I'll show you that one in a second I went to new window and I went to Market depth level two right that's logical I know that I need level two so I said yep there's my level two window and then I knew that I was going to need an order entry window which we have right here and so I went to new window and I went to order entry where is it um right here order entry so there's my order entry window so I've got one of these windows all right so that's good and then um pulled up a time in sales window right here so this is going to show me all the quotes of the stock as it's trading or it's going to show me all the orders that go through in real time and then over on the right hand side I have charts now the charts are good they're really good um you've got one minute time frame you've got 30 second 15 second 10 second and in fact they're very familiar I'm like this all this functionality feels like man where what's going on here I've used this before and I have because the same charts that we use so we license the source code from uh trading view to power our charts we connected to our own Market data we customize it a little bit for our liking we have a couple things that we change just to make it you know suited for uh for our software and uh interactive brokers has done the same thing which a lot of platforms are doing because trading view has done such a great job building charts why start from scratch when you can license it from them and it's not terribly expensive All Things Considered so their charts are great you've got the time frames you've got the sub one minute time frames um honestly if light speed did this it would be a good idea for them too but you know it takes time to do that so the charts are great no issues there um you can add your indicators you could save it it everything works really well and the way we link Windows together so when you type in um you know a a stock here like spy you got to click in the top corner so this is one thing that I'll say if you just click in the middle and type nothing happens so over on our software if you click in the middle and type it it automatically knows what you're trying to do and that's we built it that way that's what we wanted it to look like that's how we wanted it to work um here you've got to actually get your mouse up into this little tiny box and I feel like you know just a ux issue it just sometimes you're trying to move quickly and I just I don't you know I got to get the symbol up fast so not perfect but tolerable now with linking you can link these into a group grou so these are all linked on the green group of course I choose green because I always want to be green and so once you link each one of these windows together then you update one and it updates all so if I change this to yellow and then I update this to the S&P 500 and click enter it'll update all of them except well now not this one because it's on the yellow group so you just group them together like that and then you're good to go all right so for the rest of this uh platform demo I'm going to get rid of the charts because I as I said I don't need the charts um because of the charts that I'm using with um with my own platform my own software so oh and then we got a um oh so now one more thing so as I mentioned um I pulled out this level two window right here um but then I learned that there's a limitation with this level level two window which kind of reveals one of the first odd um characteristics of Trader workstation so I'm going to go ahead and close this we will save the changes we'll make this a little bit smaller here oh that's not what I want to do I just want to make it smaller without shrinking everything um anyways it's fine we'll just unlock it and move stuff over so the next step is how to create hot keys in Trader workstation okay so creating hotkeys is important as you saw me execute those orders very quickly over at light speed and in my Charles Schwab account and I could do the same thing in Trader workstation or on Weeble I want to be able to do that naturally here with interactive brokers so my kind of logic was all right typically in order to create your hot Keys you've got to go to file and then you've got to go to settings all right so now we've got this kind of laid out a little bit better here we'll just move that up a smidge just to have it there we go that's nice all right so we'll lock that we'll save that we'll go to file and then that's where I'm going to Global configuration all right so I'm going to Global configuration and immediately I'm like holy smokes okay there's a lot of settings here um but there's hot keys there we go that's all I wanted right so I go in here and I'm like all right so I want to create an order so I click on this oh and then I click create shortcut so it's a buy order so then what's the key so let's just record the key and say this is going to be shift zero just we'll just do shift zero for now and we'll go to customize right here it's going to be a buy order we're going to set it to Def to Absolute share of 10 shares order type will be limit um offset yes great because that's what I want to be able to do I want to do an offset 10 cents above the ass to allow for some slippage so we're going to do 010 for 10 cents above the ask for the offset excellent that's important because a lot of Brokers don't allow you to do offsets and that can be really hard so now here we go we've got the offset this is great and and then what else do we need transmit the order instantaneously and we've got our first little warning be aware and this is all in caps so they're shouting at you be aw I won't shout at you but you know they're shouting be aware that you are activating a feature that will enable you to create and transmit in order using a single Mouse click under the terms of the ibkr customer agreement you are responsible for all orders entered in your account okay we get it there's some big risk here so now that's turned on and then um and then with that I I'll I'll do the time and force today these you can't change as you can see and the destination will just be a smart route cuz that's basically all they give me anyways um you know I we could try NS I don't I this would be the first time I tried doing this I'm not sure if this will work we could try it let's see what happens all right so so now we're going to say okay we're going to apply and I'm thinking okay so now if I come into this level two window and I press shift zero shift zero what the heck nothing's happening shift zero shift zero shift zero nothing's happening I've got no position so now I'm confused I'm like I don't get this so I went to the settings of the level two window and I'm in this and I see that level two has its own hotkey settings and they're different they're not the general hotkey settings whoa whoa this is like okay this gets deep so now we actually are creating hotkeys based on specific Windows okay all right wow okay we get that nuanced okay all right I can work with that so here we go so now we do the same thing so we created the hotkey right down here and it's set to shift one and it's set for 100 shares right now and which is fine uh we'll just do 10 shares doesn't we'll do 10 shares so I don't lose a lot of money while we're practicing here and we'll just try we'll try the NASDAQ route again I don't know if that's going to work but we'll just try it um and then everything else is going to be the same okay so now let's apply let's say Okay so we're going to say okay and we're going to press shift one so shift one says you currently do not have trading permission for this instrument would you like to proceed to trading permission so uh oh well that's cuz we're on the S&P 500 let's change to S uh CDT so CDT and one thing I'll also note is that you have to enter a symbol and uh press the enter button twice so um that's a little bit CDT shift enter yeah so you got to enter press the the enter button twice it's a little bit of a pain so now we're going to do shift one and here all of a sudden we're getting this override so this order will be routed directly to NASDAQ they may result in higher trading fees and then so oh right so how much is the fee wait a second $318 um no sorry the the fee is 35 cents yeah because it's only 10 shares so the fee is 35 cents so I'll just override and transmit don't show this warning again okay so now we're in 10 shares boom 10 shares all right so shift one there I'm now in 20 so watch I'm going to press this so we've got the hotkey set up right here right so this is this is my hotkey so little bottle cap there so shift one so shift one so just like that is how we're jumping in and you can see my gut feeling is that how long's this take watch as it goes from uh 30 to 40 okay pressing right now now that was interesting um we just added so so wait a second so what did we just learn somewhere that other hotkey went through so we just had one hotkey that went through for 100 shares one went through for 100 shares right so now this is because we have different hotkeys set up right because there's the global ones and then there's the one that worked for this so shift one let's see so that one went through that was a slow order shift one 60 shares 160 170 sending it right now 180 so to me my gut feeling on this is that it's the routing is a little slow to what I'm accustomed to um so pressing shift one goes to 190 it it feels like it takes a solid yeah I don't know I don't know what the time is but it it doesn't feel super super fast all right so now I'm I'm in deep on this I'm in uh 200 shares at $3.19 but I got to get out oh shoot we forgot to make the sell hotkey now before we create that hotkey for bailing out as I was editing this video I realized some of you may want to learn more about my day trading strategy so I'm going to put a link it'll be pinned at the top comment and in the description where you can download my small account worksheet it's a PDF that's going to walk you through how I approach growing a small account beginning of course with risk management but then quickly getting into stock selection and the five criteria that I use to determine whether or not I think a stock has a potential to go up 50 75 even 100% not just over the course of a couple weeks but in one day and that can happen and we see it on a regular basis when a stock has breaking news now during the uh through in the small account worksheet as the PDF I'll also walk you through my entries and my exits the way I approach it so make sure you guys check that out if you've been interested in learning more about day trading and my strategy specifically so that'll be pinned to the top of the comments and Linked In the description now let's figure out how I'm going to create this hotkey to get get out of that position all right so we're going to go to settings we're going to go to hot keys so now I'm going to show you the problem you go to cell and I'm going to record the key so it could be you know contrl s to sell whatever and then customize and I want my position my size to be position I only have the option of absolute or available or default so available initially I was like oh is that my position but so I have to do by actual entering shares so this is a problem so limit now we can do bid this is all fine point minus 0 01 we can do the offset below the bid it's a day order we can make it a smart route we'll save the money on it transmit instantaneously and let's go ahead and send it all right so apply and then contrl s so let's see control oh did we do shift s or contrl S let's go back in okay so we're going to go just jump back on here and back to the hot Keys um oh maybe I didn't well it's fine um so we'll just do so we'll do this one so contrl Z so now I'm down to 100 shares right here and I'm going to press it again and now I'm down to flat but you could see like it it's not super super quick and the problem for me this is my first big problem is that I want to be able to sell based on a FR fraction of my position and what if I end up accumulating an odd position you know like 113 shares I don't want to be fumbling here trying to type 113 shares in this little order entry window so I can exit my position that's too slow so what I learned is that they have a second level two window and they have a different one that has more features this is crazy this is so unintuitive all right so but I'm I'm being maybe a little nitpicky I've been you know I know what I like from software and this is not it so all right so we go to new window and there's another level two window where the heck is it go all the way down here to more advanced tools more advanced tools and you want to go to market depth Trader it's kind of hidden down there you wouldn't see it you know probably normally I mean it's not it's not super obvious that it's right there now I can also pull up um I'll see I'll pull I can pull up a news window here as well um that we can just Link in here so we'll just put a little news window here we'll see if this loads so I that we'll just put right there and we'll do another news window um news news wire um um company specific news we'll put this one here we'll do this one instead all right so we're going to close this we're going to link this up to the green and then we've got company specific news all right so this window right here is the level two um Advanced Trader window so now we go into the settings of this window and you go it so this has its own set of settings right and it has its own set of hot keys so now your shift one hotkey make sure it's not 100 shares so customize it's set to 100 right so we got to drop that down to 10 shares otherwise we're going to be taking too much size all right so we've got that set up all right now contrl Z here's the thing um on in this software here you can create one single close position hotkey and I set it to contrl Z and it's going to close your position and it transmits instantaneously but it closes your full position and you can only create one of those hot keys so let me show you so we're going to do uh shift one shift one shift one see we're going 20 30 40 shares right so now I'm going to press contrl Z flat the whole position all right and this is real money so I just lost $26 now I don't mind doing it but I'm just saying this is a real money account so this isn't a simulator this is actually how fast orders route so the control Z is great but that's that's the best we get is control Z so if you want to let's say you want to buy right here 10 shares and then you want to sell at the ask you can do that but you have to go in and you actually have to choose the fixed number of shares that you want to sell on the ask and that for me is not ideal functionality so even if you go to a platform that's commission free like Weeble you can go to hotkeys you can go to settings and we'll go to trade and then hotkey settings here and this is a let's see um sell ask half position it's a limit order to sell quantity 50% at the ask price no offset extended hours it's easy this isn't to me it's like this isn't complicated to offer these features it's just I think these Brokers don't necessarily cater to Traders like maybe most of us who are momentum trading they just don't think to and so you know they just don't add those features um but they should and it would enable Traders like ourselves who are very active to use the software much more effectively so your orders have to be based on fixed share sizes which I find to be not great okay so now we've got a couple little issues um I would say and let's pull up our broker comparison sheet here all right so where did that go I've got a nice broker comparison sheet so my broker comparison sheet here for um these are for a uh as you can see a number of different Brokers uh and these are not just the Brokers these are also comparing them with specific platforms so Trader workstation um is right here this is the trader workstation column and I already did a platform demo of interactive brokers light using ibkr desktop which is their desktop platform which um I said would not really be adequate for me at this time why they don't have level two says it's coming soon they don't have hot keys to Auto send they do offer offsets which is good but they don't offer position position by percentages selling in half or quarters and they also don't show halt levels so how does ibkr interactive brokers Pro with trade a workstation stackup yes you have level two well thank goodness yes you have hot Keys yes you have off offsets but you can't sell based on percentages and that's a problem for me and you only have resumption quotes you don't have lld Limit Up limit down levels so you know just based on these five criteria which are some of the most important um these there's only you know a handful of Brokers that sort of include all four or all five and it's these ones right here so light speed Charles Schwab with Das Trader Weeble or interactive brokers with Dash Trader right because let's pull Dash Trader back up here for one second this was Dash Trader so using Dash Trader you can actually create hotkeys with the offsets that you'd like so let's go into the hotkey file here and and we'll pull this up so now you can create a hot key we can just go to new item and I'll just show you really quickly kind of how this works so you would create your script and say I want to sell position size or share size is going to be um position time 0.5 and you could change that to 0.25 or 0.15 whatever you want doesn't matter price ask plus whatever or bid we'll do bid and we'll do um minus 10 so we're going to change that from a plus to A minus time and force day plus mode load and send build script boom that's it and now it works easy now this software has been around for almost 20 years you know they they figured it out it's not that hard so the nice thing is you actually if you wanted to could use interactive brokers with Dash Trader you can link them now the downside to that is it's going to cost a little money but let's just look at that for second so interactor Brokers Trader workstation right here you don't get the offsets or you don't get the percentages uh selling percentages and that's kind of my biggest issue um how fast was the execution in my experience I mean you saw those orders are they are they fast I wouldn't really say so um and it's a direct access broker you're paying fees and commissions on that whereas here boom instant 250 shares 500 750,000 boom back out I mean it's so fast this is the speed that you need if you're trading breaking news if you're trading volatile markets you need speed and that's what we've got here so you don't really at least in my experience I don't feel like I get that at interactive brokers um Pro with Trader workstation I'm not saying it's the slowest I've ever used but it's not the fastest either now just for the sake of argument let's go ahead and throw out and this might cost me a little money here but let's let's just throw out a 5,000 share position and let's just see what happens so we're going to do limit price um we're just going to do it the ask so oh it's it's not transmitted yet so we'll just transmit that how many did it go through for 500 oh I meant 5,000 um I just wanted to see if it um possibly so we're just going to um the order size exceeds the size limit of 500 please update to 10,000 so this is on this is on my um my account so so we got to go back over here so we got to go over to uh file we've got to go to configuration let's see um where is it trying to type in here to search for order so you can you can select your order size although I picked a bad time to do this because you can see the price is really dropping so order size where is this um stocks presets I think it's the presets oh and that actually reminds me that um under presets let's see um there was a preset I had to allow order to be routed and executed during premarket session FYI if you want to trade interactive brokers using Trader workstation pre-market you have to go into the presets under stocks and check allow order to be routed and executed during pre-market session if available that is critical otherwise it's not going to work um your order will just sit there but yeah I can't um oh so size limit 10,000 shares um total value you know $100,000 doesn't matter um sure just I'm just going to apply this for right now we'll see what it does so all right so we so now we've got an 82,000 share seller right here um which is not not ideal so it's not really a great spot to take a big position I just don't want to um take a let me just pull up the chart C maybe we'll do I'll do it on a stock that's not quite so volatile so I'm going to um press contrl Z take that loss and let's switch to Ford all right so Ford's a company that's not moving too much so we'll go to Ford and we're going to pull up the stock right so I'm going to go ahead and buy 5,000 shares of this and the reason that I want to do this by the way each time you're clicking here and this is actually a problem um so I just clicked there and it put out an order uh for 286,000 shares oh and after hours is just begun well discard all right doesn't matter so the the point here see each time you click that uh discard each time you're I'm clicking these orders it's sending that through I bet that we could turn that off in the settings um if we went in here but um but rather than spend time kind of going through this let's let's just take a step back because the what I was getting to is that for me Interactive Broker uh Trader workstation not really an ideal platform and in fact Trader workstation or interactive brokers with Das Trader would be a little bit better the only issue is that you still have to contend with the fact that the execution speed isn't as fast as with some of the other Brokers out there so that's a problem now let's talk about the RW score so we go to the top so Trader workstation is a 4.9 it's a 4.9 which is primarily because they don't allow position offsets right here so this is not a platform that I would use with real money either with a small account or with a big account now would I use this is Trader workstation here now would I use interactive brokers with Dash Trader it would be an eight if it not for rule 144 what is Rule 144 interactive brokers is the only broker that I've ever seen enforce this rule so let me pull it up so you can see what it looks like so here we go it's right here all right so Trader work station or interactive brokers so rule 4 144 uh the number of shares you may sell during any 3-month period cannot exceed 1% of the outstanding shares of the same class being sold or greater than 1% of the average reported weekly trading volume and this is if you are an affiliate this is a rule for Affiliates if you're an affiliate to an issuer now the problem here is that interactive brokers airs on the side of caution by saying anyone and by saying essentially everyone is an affiliate and you have to affirmatively say you're not an affiliate of the company if you sell more than 1% of the average 4-we daily volume or of the total shares outstanding so let's talk about what this means in a practical sense so let's look at this stock today CDT so CDT is the stock that I traded today and made the most on uh stocks up a solid 80% right now and it has today 143 million shares of volume I made $40,000 trading it my results are not typical I've been doing this for a long time now here's the thing how much volume did this stock have yesterday let's check yesterday it traded 69,000 shares that's it 659 th000 shares so in fact the average daily volume over the last four weeks is probably looks like about half a million shares a day so 500,000 shares a day that's the average daily volume 500,000 so what that means is that 500,000 shares per day is average what's 1% of that 5,000 shares right so if you buy 5,000 shares and then you sell 5,000 shares what's going to happen your account's blocked you can't sell you cannot sell until you first go through their compliance team and tell them I am not an affiliate of the company I'm allowed to sell I'm not an affiliate of this company and I've heard of people that have said it takes two three hours to go through compliance one person said it was as short as 45 minutes nonetheless during all of that time you cannot sell you cannot sell the position so what if you're trading something like this that's very volatile it could be going up or down 50% in 45 minutes and you can't sell that makes interactive brokers um essentially not VI for small cap trading uh now it's not an issue if you're trading large caps if you're trading Tesla Netflix and Amazon Google doesn't matter but if you're trading small caps this is going to be a problem what's interesting to me is that this is not enforced by any other broker dealer it's not enforced by light speed Schwab Weeble erade it's not enforced by Fidelity it's not enforced by Robin Hood it's not enforced by trade station it's not enforced by Centerpoint Guardian Co CRA any other broker CM um Ocean trade zero any other broker that I've ever heard of I've never heard of this being enforced by anyone other than interactive brokers now look they're airing on the side of caution they want to protect themselves but assuming that every customer or client of theirs is an affiliate and making you affirmatively say you're not an affiliate seems Seems like Overkill and based on industry standard it it would appear that it is over kill because no one else is doing it so if they got rid of that rule 144 maybe they give you the warning they tell you look this is a rule do you know about it and as long as you're not an affiliate then it doesn't apply to you then you can continue to trade so interactive brokers could be an eight they could turn to Green they could be an eight if you use interactive brokers with d Trader because then you get all five of these items you get halt levels you get position selling by percentage of position and you can customize your level to in a way that's so much more visual visually appealing so here I can go in I can adjust the fonts I can really make it look good with interactive brokers yes you can go in here um and thank goodness I didn't punch that for 5,000 shares that would have been a bad spot to do it um but you could go in here and you can go under um Trader let's see quote columns um level two panels you could change the data you see you can go to colors you know you can change the the these colors around you can't change the font f um you could change the font for pending orders but not for so it's you know it's look it's it's good it's it's not terrible but but it could be better and so there's other platforms out there that are better so why what's the point of using software that is kind of clunky and isn't easy to use when there's something else out there that's better well the cost so this is going to cost you just Market data that's it this is going to cost you $175 a month to use D Trader $175 a month and the order execution is not going to be any faster because it still connects to interactive brokers on the back end so it'll be the same execution speed now when it comes to published execution speed um interactive brokers being a direct access broker doesn't publish uh those execution speeds at least anywhere that I could see and where they do publish their execution speed is on ibkr light which is their Commission free broker so that doesn't count because that's going through payment for order flow in fact based on my testing the fastest broker would be uh light speed and if I did a broker platform demo of Guardian Center Point or Cobra I suspect those would all Match Light Speed now I don't know for a fact I have to test them but I suspect that they would so you know we we could add columns for those Brokers and most of them uh I mean so I'll just do one column to the left so let's see so Guardian is one of them and then Center Point um is the other and these are probably at a minimum going to come in at 7.5 they're probably actually going to come in at at eight at a minimum they're going to start at eight because they're direct access yes you're going to pay higher commissions so it's probably going to be um it's actually um per share so per share pricing which is a little bit more expensive so both of these are per share so they're going to be a little bit more expensive um but then the rest of their settings are just take exactly what you've got here from DH Trader because guess what they use Dash Trader so now you're using that same software that we're accustomed to so you know there's some more stuff to fill out for these but um yeah just to give you a little bit more color there all right so I think what you've learned today is that interactive brokers Trader workstation doesn't meet the cut for me and and it could well Trader workstation really couldn't interactor Brokers could work with Dash Trader but they got to eliminate that rule 144 if you're using interactive brokers and you want to check out using Dash Trader I'll put a link to this video right here which is the dash Trader platform demo so you might want to check that out and I'll put a link to another episode you guys might enjoy right here and I want to thank you as always for tuning in if you enjoy these platform demos I hope you hit the thumbs up I hope you are subscribed to the channel and as always I will see you for the next upload real soon thanks for tuning in [Music]