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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?"
Works well with Firefox on any platform, in my experience.
http://tinyurl.com/4ny52
For those non-professional traders, what is 'Level 2'?
http://www.rtsgroup.net/
Very good, more institutional - but have heard that they will support inviduals too
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)
zosxavius photography
Wow, we've got someone who runs Linux exclusively and is a capitalist?
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.
PrimeTrader is pretty neat. It's also one of the few Lisp commercial applications out there.
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.
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.
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.
FalconShould there be a Law?