TradeStation Review for 2024

Should You Choose TradeStation?

TradeStation’s main appeal lies in its impressive collection of trading tools. Experienced traders will have a hard time finding more powerful platforms anywhere else but, naturally, there’s a downside to it all. Faced with such advanced instruments, beginners might feel a bit overwhelmed and will have to rely heavily on TradeStation’s educational resources.

Luckily, there’s plenty of them.

With that in mind, let’s take a closer look at what exactly TradeStation can do so you can decide it is the right fit for you.

Tradable Products

TradeStation grants you access to an extensive assortment of financial instruments such as stocks, IPOs, stock options, ETFs, futures, futures options, bonds, mutual funds, and even cryptocurrencies (Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Ether, Litecoin, USDC, and XRP). However, if forex trading is what you’re searching for, you’d better look elsewhere.

Trading Platforms

You can use three types of platforms to access various markets: desktop, web, and mobile. They are highly stable, with a noteworthy uptime of 99.999%.

Desktop Platform

This platform is the company’s flagship product and for good reason. Its key features include:

EasyLanguage – TradeStation's proprietary programming language that doesn’t require a coding specialist’s level of expertise. It allows you to create customized indicators and trading strategies, as well as your very own apps that you can make available in the company's TradingApp Store.

RadarScreen – With this real-time scanner, you won’t miss a single trading opportunity ever again. It monitors up to 1,000 symbols in real time, with each row representing a chart that has access to customizable historical data.

Strategy Backtesting – You can use the app to review the performance of your strategies based on historical data and then automate your trading ideas accordingly. The best way to learn how to trade is by practicing, and this platform lets you do precisely that – all without putting your money at risk.

Matrix – The Matrix window provides a graphical representation of market depth and trade activity. What we like most about it, though, is its lightning-fast trade execution capability. Both one-click and drag-and-drop ordering methods are available.

OptionStation Pro – This options trading analysis tool enables you to chart theoretical positions using interactive 3D graphs, calculate options prices and Greeks, place trades directly from the theoretical positions, and much, much more.

TradeStation Web Platform

If you don’t have enough space on your computer to install a new piece of software or you simply don’t want to be tied to a single machine, TradeStation’s web trading platform is the perfect solution.

The web platform’s core capabilities are the same as those the desktop version incorporates, like streaming market data, conducting stock chart analysis, and executing advanced orders. You can easily access it by going to the TradeStation Client Center or by clicking on the “Log In” button from any of the website’s pages.

Those who wish to use both desktop and web versions should know that watchlists don’t sync between these two platforms. Nevertheless, the web platform is much more feature-rich and reliable than the majority of other systems we’ve seen.

Mobile Platform

A company rarely manages to develop a trading app that’s almost as good as its other products but that’s exactly what this online broker did. The primary mobile platform gives you the ability to trade anywhere at any time without having to resort to a more robust alternative when making complex orders.

Although the app is easy to use, having a larger-screen device to access it from is recommendable since you’ll probably need to sift through a lot of data. The software automatically syncs your watchlists with the web-based platform and, best of all, it’s fully customizable. So much so, in fact, that you can even create personalized alerts.

If you wish to trade options on futures, though, you’ll have to download the TradeStation FuturesPlus app.

TradeStation Pricing and Promotions

TradeStation offers two main pricing plans for trading securities – TS GO and TS SELECT. The TS SELECT users have $0 commissions on all three of TradeStation’s platforms, while TS GO clients pay an extra fee of $10 for equity and options trades, as well as an additional $1.40 for each futures trade made through TradeStation’s desktop platform.

However, even with no commissions, you’ll still have to pay per contract costs, which range from $0.50 to $1.50.

The TS GO plan includes slightly lower stock options and futures fees and has no minimum account balance requirement. On the other hand, if you choose the TS SELECT pricing scheme, you’ll need to deposit at least $2,000.

If you’re the kind of trader that prefers to trade often and in small blocks, you might want to consider the per-share plan. The starting price is as low as $0.01 per share for the first 500 shares, after which you’ll only pay $0.006 for every share, per trade.

Another pricing option to familiarize yourself with is the unbundled plan, which is great for high-volume trading. At first glance, this cost may seem similar to the per-share pricing. However, the more shares you trade per month the lower the fees are. For instance, if you execute more than 100,000 shares per month, your commission per share will be $0.007.

TradeStation’s cryptocurrency rates are a whole different story. First of all, they are based on your account balance and not your trading volume. Secondly, there’s no minimum deposit requirement and, finally, you can incur either the maker or the taker fees. The maker fees apply to orders that are not immediately marketable, and the taker fees to those that are.

That said, all maker fees are $0, while taker fees for any account balance of up to $100,000 are 0.60%. They change to 0.30% for sums over $100,000 and if the amount exceeds $1 million, they total 0.15%.

Non-Trading Fees

Compared to other brokerages, most of TradeStation’s non-trading fees are average. However, there are a few exceptions that make it more affordable than some.

 The account service fee is waived if you’re on one of the commission-free trading plans or if you have met at least one of the following conditions in the preceding month:

• Trading 10 round-turn futures and/or futures options contracts
• Trading 50 options contracts
• Trading 5,000 shares
• Maintaining an account balance of $100,000

Additionally, broker-assisted transactions, deposits, and receiving wire transfers are all free of charge.

Promotions

TradeStation clients can take advantage of several generous promotions the company offers.

If you’re opening a new account, you can type in the promo code CASHAFRV and receive cash rewards for deposited funds. Check out our table below to find out more details about this offer:

The futures margin reduction promotion keeps day-trade rates overnight. US equity index futures, full-sized crude oil, 30-year treasury bond, 10-year treasury note, and full-sized gold and silver futures are eligible for this discount.

You can also earn by letting TradeStation lend out your shares. It’s a pretty good deal considering that on top of the interest you’ll also receive monthly deposits equaling your dividend payments. Your lent stocks are backed by US dollar collateral, ensuring the safety of the entire process, and you can exit the program at any time by selling the securities.

Lastly, we’d like to mention the futures trading offer, which allows you to trade futures in your IRA account at just $0.65 per contract per side. The offer goes for all types of accounts, so you only need to remember to use the promo code 0035AEZP.

TradeStation Account Types

The accounts are grouped into three main categories: Individual and Joint, Retirement, and Entity. The first category is the most popular due to the flexibility of the accounts included, which are Individual, Joint with Right of Survivorship, Joint Tenants in Common, and Custodial.

The second account group involves traditional, Roth, Simplified Employee Pension (SEP), and Savings Incentive Match Plan for Employees (SIMPLE) IRA accounts. Businesses can open trust, corporation, general partnership, limited partnership, limited liability, and sole proprietorship entity accounts.

It is also worth mentioning that although clients from anywhere in the world can create securities trading accounts, only US customers will have access to all the company’s products, platform features, account types, and pricing plans.

Our Verdict

After having thoroughly examined the company and everything it has to offer, we can honestly say that there’s little to dislike about it. The pricing plans are very affordable and TradeStation’s platforms, although a bit puzzling to beginners at first, are every experienced trader’s dream come true.

If you’re not in the latter category but you’re up for the challenge, you can learn a lot by using the TradeStation paper trading feature as well as its copious educational resources.