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Linux Friendly Online Brokerages?

Posted by Cliff on from the daytrading-for-penguins dept.

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?"

6 of 40 comments (clear)

  1. Ameritrade. by ubiquitin · · Score: 4, Informative

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

    --
    http://tinyurl.com/4ny52
    1. Re:Ameritrade. by mutterc · · Score: 2, Informative
      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.

  2. RTS by RussHart · · Score: 2, Informative

    http://www.rtsgroup.net/

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

  3. Re:Scottrader? by ZosX · · Score: 4, Informative

    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)

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    zosxavius photography
  4. interactivebrokers.com by kjeldahl · · Score: 2, Informative

    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.

  5. PrimeTrader by ratatask · · Score: 2, Informative

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