“RAPI is the fastest retail API on the market by a wide margin. It beats ninjatrader, TradeStation and all other s by a magnitude. RTrader itself has a few drawbacks though.
1. It does not track bracket orders in the performance P&L. Instead it uses first in first out which matches the wrong entry and exits together instead of the actual bracket entries and exit.
2. The performance data goes away after market close. It just disappears completely. So you have no real orde level P&L history.
3. There is no concept of entry vs exit order natively. You have to use bracket orders being null to be assumed as entry’s and bracket orders not null to be the exit. Doable, but for anyone starting out, digging through the order history and recent orders tab this can be tricky. If you are expecting an entry va exit order designation - you will need to use bracket orders or time as a proxy.
4. The app goes down after market close on Friday and stays down until the market opens on Sunday. So for want to see your order history over the weekend- no dice. The app won’t even let you login to SIM to see old orders”
“I wish the DoM was more customizable. While I enjoy the platform, I find myself using ToS for charting and trade using Rithmic mobile. I'm even thinking about trying out Sierra Chart in order to have access to a quality customized DoM.”
“Chart manipulation of any kind is horrid, the aviable chart "styles" are also awful. The manual for this software is from 2011, it's using windows 7 in its examples. This foreshadows what you're getting into with this platform. I have attempted to contacted them multiple times to change the inaccurate commission fees they built into the software. They never responded, it doesn't seem to be something you can change. Such a simple and necessary adjustment for users to have accurate commission fees be portrayed in their P&L. Yet this archaic abandoned relic of technological waste can not even offer that.
I still use it only because R-Trader pro when paired with rithmic data is incredibly fast, takes no resources to run on the computer and its easy enough to use something else to chart on. If you are doing anything other than simple order brackets or scalping. It's suggested you find something else, the most basic chart manipulations are nearly purposefully made slow, difficult, and unintuitive.
If you are used to a ninja trader or TDA/charles schwab type of chart trading with dragging bracket orders to mitigate risk and adjusting profit targets on the fly. Adjustments of charting resources like lines, channels, zones, initial balances etc... STAY AWAY from this trash. It's only only relevance is the FREE offering from most brokers, the low data fees from Rithmic, and people only using it as a means of the most basic trade executions. Try it at your own metal health risks.”
“For click-trading you can't go wrong with R Trader Pro, the built in risk management features are great and you can create just about any complex order execution flow you can think of, much more advanced than other retail software from what I have seen. However, the UI can seem a bit dated (Winforms MDI?) depending on what you are used to and the charting is a bit basic for my personal tastes. For algorithmic traders the R+ API for .NET has been a blessing, very easy to use and well documented. I've been developing with the API for over a year now and couldn't be happier.”
