Linux Friendly Online Brokerages?

freelunch asks: "I need to switch online brokers and, not wanting a dedicated Windows box just to trade, would like to find one that has Linux friendly Level 2 tools. Many of the Java trading platforms are unreliable/incompatible/unsupported under Linux (Scottrader is very unreliable and not L2). Any help?"

Comments

Ameritrade.

[ubiquitin]

Works well with Firefox on any platform, in my experience.

Re:Ameritrade.

[mutterc]

Ameritrade also works just fine for me in Firefox on Linux.

However, I'm not doing anything fancy, just buying, selling, looking at account history, and such. I tend to do research on Yahoo Finance, and have no need of Level II stuff, so I've no idea how well Ameritrade's site works in those areas.

Re:Ameritrade.

[MarkusQ]

Oddly, they say that they require IE (or did, the last time I noticed), even though it works fine cross-browser.

I once wrote them about the fact that they were requiring the use (or at least claimed to be) of the products of one of the companies that were traded through their service in a way that might seem to be an endorsement. I also pointed out this was ironic in view of the fact that the company in question was a convicted monopolist with a history of just this sort of positioning. I also pointed out that, as far as I could tell, their site was reasonably cross-browser, which must have taken some work--so why weren't they admiting it?

I don't think I ever heard back, but I still use them.

--MarkusQ

Re:play with the big boys

[Anonymous Coward]

Woof! Woof! Grrr!

Scottrader?

[ZosX]

Scottrader isn't level 2? Hell from watching the glitzy commercials I got the impression that their software did everything but the kitchen sink. How the hell did Scott Trade get into this market anyways? I mean, nobody heard of them (at least me) until very recently. Their commercials are really annoying too. The one where the kid paints a mural on the barn. Come on. Giving people more for their buck. Give me a break. All that hype and they don't even do level 2. I love it. Guess they aren't on the next level afterall.

Re:Scottrader?

[Asgard]

For those non-professional traders, what is 'Level 2'?

Re:Scottrader?

[ZosX]

Ask and ye shall recieve:

Check this out here.

A snippet for the lazy:

Level I

A Level I quote is the most basic information available about a stock. It is information available to all at no extra fee. A Level I quote consists of:

        * Bid
        * Ask
        * Quote size
        * Last trade
        * Volume
        * High
        * Low

Level II

Level II goes a step beyond Level I. It basically reveals the order book for a Nasdaq stock. But it's not the complete order book, rather it shows the best bid and offer of every market participant who is publicly posting a quote.

The upper part of this Level II display should look familiar, it is basic Level I information. In this example we have, left to right, top to bottom:

        * Last, Last Size, Change
        * Bid, Ask, Quote Size
        * Open, Low, High

To the right is what should be another familiar tool, the tape, or the ticker. It is a list of trades as they happen. The price is given as well as the number of shares traded. Upticks are shown in green, downticks in red, and zero ticks in gray.

But the information we're interested in, at least in this article, is the Level II information that makes up the rest of the display.

On the left side are the current bids of market participants, ranked from best to worst, highest to lowest. On the right are the offers, again ranked from best to worst, here from lowest to highest.

Each line in the display gives three pieces of information. The market maker ID, a four letter identifying code, the price bidding or offering at, and the number of shares being bid for or offered.

For example, on the offer side, the fifth offer down reads as follows:

            MSCO 89 1/2 10

What is this telling us? Morgan Stanley is offering 1,000 shares of Sun Microsystems (SUNW) at 89 1/2. Now, where did I get that? MSCO is the market maker ID of Morgan Stanley. Since moscow is on the right side, or offer side, of the window, it is selling stock. The price it would like to sell at is 89 1/2. It is selling 1,000 shares as evidenced by its size of 10 (all sizes shown are in hundreds).

Read more if you are still interested.........

(I HATE THE DAMNED JUNK FILTER)

Re:Scottrader?

[Elladan]

Level 2 is for day traders, that is, people who want to play video games with the stock market, and aren't interested in investing.

It involves having some ultimately useless technical information such as the price of a stock right now this very second OMG! Buy buy SELL!

Level 3 is reserved for the Martian overlords who really control the stock market.

OT: sig

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude, wtf's up with that sig?

E*TRADE works for me

[Anonymous Coward]

Then again I make about 2-3 transactions per year (personally I have trouble calling a $20,000 asset purchase a "trade").

If you're an active trader who doesn't work on Wall Street, I can see why Linux might be all the you can afford. Unless you're one of the 25% of traders who beat the market out of sheer luck! I'm sure the big trader boys and MM's on Wall Street appreciate having suckers like you to "churn" for them!

RTS

[RussHart]

http://www.rtsgroup.net/

Very good, more institutional - but have heard that they will support inviduals too

Re:play with the big boys

[wcb4]

I don't see an honest opinion here as flamebait. Its not like the poster said "Microsoft rulez", he simply states that the business world uses Windows, this is true. If its on a desk at a business, its running windows (and if its not, then you are part of such a statistically insignificant segment that you do not count). If the poster wants the tools of a pro, and wants to be a pro, then do what those in the profession do, run windows, run the right tools.

Come on, I dislike MS as much as the next Slashdotter (the company, not the products. I think they have a few outstanding products, some that are alrights, and a lot of crap, like any other big software company and certainly just like the F/OSS world) , but the right tool for the right job. If the tools exist, but not for our platform, then you are using the wrong platform for the job

Catering to the minority within the minority?

[payamchee]

Wow, we've got someone who runs Linux exclusively and is a capitalist?

Re:Catering to the minority within the minority?

[Anonymous Coward]

Times are achanging..

I'm a capitalist, so is my agent, our accountancy firm and the firm we use for payrolling and invoicing. We have all switched to Linux on the desktop during the past two years.
While one proprietary app in the NY office has to be accessed using citrix - thats the only remnant of Windows that we have left.

In general - all our operations outside the us is linux only with only the US remaining on win due to the above mentioned app. Switching to Linux seems easier to accomplish in non-us locations. In my current jurisdiction, the official tax reporting software is open source (win, linux and macosx) and is distributed by the government free of charge.

As for good trading sites that welcome linux users - check ubs.com and internaxx.com. Not 100% on how advanced (level 1 or 2 quotes) they are, but you can trade just about anything on most exchanges using their online services.

Re:Catering to the minority within the minority?

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux is not particularly anticapitalist. Intellectual "property" monopolies such as copyright and patent are (anti- free-market-capitalist, anyway).

Anyone calling themselves a free-market capitalist and supporting copyright and patent law is a hypocrite.

Strengthening patent law is symptomatic of crony capitalism / crapitalism / corporatism.

Re:Catering to the minority within the minority?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, a capitalist who actually prefer to get the best system at the best price - that's quite new.

Every selv-respecting capitalist would prefer to have one product at one price as ordered by the one monopoly, no matter if the monopoly is based in Havannah, Beijing or Redmond.

Somehow it seems the meaning of the word "capitalist" got reversed shortly after the fall of the Berlin wall.

Depends what you're trading

[madaxe42]

Eurex have a Java trading platform, as do Reuters, both of which are cross platform - CBOT also hook in through an app similar to the Eurex driver, and the IPE provide a Java trading front end. To be honest, though, they all suck pretty badly. If you want something half decent, just use a windows based trading screen, such as EAT or RefcoPro.

Fidelity...

[Nutria]

... was Linux friendly, the last time I checked by account online. Hope they haven't changed!

Re:Fidelity...

[Anonymous Coward]

I haven't used their trading system, but their 401K page works fine with Firefox on Linux. I'd imagine that their trading tools would work too.

Not sure who *is*

[SLot]

but I can state for a fact that Bank of America Investment Services is *not*. They are IE only, which is odd, because BofA's online banking works wonderfully with Galeon/Netscape/Mozilla/etc.

Re:play with the big boys

[Nasarius]

How is that a troll? The "ideal solution" is that this guy doesn't want to move away from Linux.

I can sympathize; I think Windows is awful as a development platform. No decent WM, no screen (not even for Cygwin), and a godawful mess just to get a few Python modules installed.

VMWare?

[m0rph3us0]

Just run a copy of VMWare in Linux. Problem solved. I used to run it on a 2nd monitor, worked great.

interactivebrokers.com

[kjeldahl]

It's java (which may be less than ideal), but it works just fine with linux. They also have the most datafeeds for an affordable price, if you want to look at futures and/or currencies in addition to stocks.

Wine

[Jules Labrie]

Did you try to see if your known brokerage applications are running under Linux with Wine ? This can be a good tool to make a transition to Linux without losing all the facilities you had under Windows...

PrimeTrader

[ratatask]

PrimeTrader is pretty neat. It's also one of the few Lisp commercial applications out there.

Re:play with the big boys

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

It sounded like a troll to me. If I ask a specific question like, "I want to find a good CAD program that will run on a laptop running OS X" then it is not appropriate or useful to answer, "CAD programs only run on Windows, use Windows." It is doubly inappropriate to make glib and derogatory remarks about "playing with the big boys" while doing so.

The poster stated that they were looking for a Linux solution, telling them not to do what they want to is in no way helpful. If your opinion is there is no such solution, fine then say that. In any case as other posters have pointed out, there are a dozen or so companies that do what the user wanted. We obviously don't know the parameters within which this project must fit, aside from those stated. Maybe he is working in an environment where Windows is not allowed. Maybe he runs SELinux and wants to keep all his banking locked up, encrypted, and protected from hacking within a Linux v-server. Maybe he is just an engineer who uses his machine for Linux development and wants to do some more serious day trading than he has been. The point is, is someone asks a specific question, it is presumptuous and unproductive to tell them that what they are doing is incorrect and to do something else. Doing so in the manner the earlier poster did is either trolling or flaming.

TDWaterhouse

[gr8fulnded]

I've been using TDWaterhouse (recently merged with Ameritrade, previously recommended in earlier post) for a couple years now and have never had a problem.

day traders and investors

[falconwolf]

Level 2 is for day traders, that is, people who want to play video games with the stock market, and aren't interested in investing.

It may be true that some day traders aren't interested in investing but some are. Though I have yet to start trading or investing I plan on doing both. What I plan on is to setup two different accounts, one for investing for the long term and the other for trading. Not just day trading but a mix of day, swing, and longer term trading.

Falcon

Re:day traders and investors

[Elladan]

So in other words, you're going to set up one account for investing, and another account for silly stock market games.

Notice that you instinctively know that there will be no day trading in the account where you intend to actually make money through investments. *grin*

Just make sure the day trading account is a small one! And try to find a broker that makes their day trading engine look like GTA3. In fact, I think I'll patent that idea now and make a fortune! Yeah! 3D first person day trading shooter engine!

Re:day traders and investors

[falconwolf]

Notice that you instinctively know that there will be no day trading in the account where you intend to actually make money through investments. *grin*

Just make sure the day trading account is a small one!

The investments I plan to make are for the long term and as I add money to the account I want to have a mix of investments with some agressive growth stocks, as well as some growth and value stocks and bonds. For the trading account I'd open it with only what I could afford to loose and if I'm able to make money from it I'll shift some to the investment account. Of course I don't know when the accounts will be opened, I have to check with my sister who was supposed to open them for me.

Falcon

Re:play with the big boys

[nxtw]

I have screen on Windows... there's a package for Services for UNIX...

Laziness

[jpostel]

I am assuming this is the case for companies other than those I have worked for or with.

Most of the web devs I have worked with have been lazy. I would point out that their code did not work with Netscape (standard at the time) and they would reply that, "IE comes with Windows, so everyone has it." I would mention w3c standards compliance, thinking that someone would want to keep the work they do up to recent standards, and they would reply, "w3c?"

I have been fortunate to know web devs who cared about their work, but they have been few and far between.

Re:play with the big boys

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a decent WM - bblean, but there are others...

optionsxpress

[Zurk]

i only use optionsxpress. they dont have everything but work well with firefox/mozilla on linux and have a software API exposed for all your real-time C hacks for calculating IVs etc.

-1, DIPSHIT

[Anonymous Coward]

n/t

If you're playing stocks at Level II...

[WoTG]

You can probably afford an extra PC to run Windows just for trading. Besides, you will always run the risk that the trading platform isn't tested as well on Linux. One bad event could easily cost you more than an extra PC (or VMWare). To keep things tidy, consider Windows XP Pro + Remote Desktop + the Linux rdesktop (?) client. Cheap, quick, and you'll be able to play all the greatest games after hours.

Is there an API? (interactivebrokers.com)

[mi]

A friend of mine is using eTrade (Windows only) because of the API they provide (their own language, in fact). He paid programmers to implement automated trading software for him -- it can buy and sell depending on a variety of data all of which is available from the eTrade's stream(s).

Can something like this be done with your broker's software?

Re:Is there an API? (interactivebrokers.com)

[mi]

Oops, it is, actually, the Tradestation he is using.

And one of the "killer features" is the ability to "back-test" an algorigthm with the historical data -- whether or not it would've made money in the past.