Tradestation used to be the best. In the past, experienced and professional traders always used Tradestation. However, within the past few years, things have changed. About 3 years ago, when I was about to change to TRAD, I went to a trading conference and was amazed that may experienced traders were talking bad about tradestation. I changed to TRAD anyways, and now I'm about to leave.

My trading fees are abount $1K/month. But that's not why I'm complaining. Although their platform is still one of the best, their execution, reliability of data, and downtime have gone to hell. It's getting much more difficult to daytrade under these horrible conditions.

Their "Intelligent" routing absolutely sucks. Sometimes it may take up to 2 to 3 seconds for a market order to fill on a highly liquid stock. I sometimes route manually to get a better time. Lately, I'm also getting fills way outside of the bid/ask price, and this is getting worse as time goes by.

The biggest problem now is shorting. As I daytrade, I don't hold any positions overnight. As of the past week, two of my favorite trades, RIMM and SKF are not shortable due to SHO. However, I also have an Interactive Brokers account and I can short both at IB. I don't understand why they don't allow intraday shorting of any equity intraday (specially highly liquid ones).

And last friday, I placed a market order which got stuck in their system. Their routing screwed up and held my order for THE ENTIRE DAY, without allowing me to cancel it. They said my trade has been filled by the exchange, but they don't know at what price until they reconcile their account at the end of the day. Any trader knows how it feels to be stuck in a trade that you can't get out of (gain or loss).

Tradestation needs to seriously clean up their act. I'm just about at the edge of changing brokers.