The digital era has revolutionised countless industries, markets, and businesses, bringing an efficiency to our lives we’ve never previously experienced.
The digitisation of trading and online trading software is a particularly significant change that can make a quick and dramatic difference to your life and livelihood.
Online trading software effectively lowers the barrier to entry into the stock market – you only need a laptop and internet connection then kaboom – you’re good to go – start trading.
No need to live in or near New York to trade live, those days are long gone.
Now we’re caught up to 2021, let’s explore the features that form a great online trading platform by looking at examples from TradeZero’s online trading software.
Tradezero has free online trading software too, but today we’re going to break down ZeroPro.
So, here we go, your five-step checklist to ensure you have the best trading software available to you.
1. A good stock trading scanner
First off, you need a good scanner included in your trading software. Something that tells you the leading stocks that have gapped up and down on the day.
As day traders, we trade volatility, so knowing what is up the most and down the most on any given day is key.
The more you can customise a scan, the better, as it can help you identify plays suited to your style. TradeZero scans are customised based on activity and specific markets. For example, if you just want to see leading gappers on the Nasdaq, there is a filter for that.
2. Real-time charting & level two
For day-traders, it’s often important to react quickly when trading - so the best day trading software must therefore be built to accommodate that need.
Having level 2 and charts on the same screen can make a big difference. There is an easy, one click feature that can link level 2, daily charts, and intraday charts together on the same screen.
In recent years, huge levels of trading activity can occur at the market open, so software must be able to handle and process huge levels of volume without slowing down or freezing.
Lastly, many traders use a variety of indicators to place a trade, so the likes of: Vwap, Bollinger Bands, Mac D, RSI and many more should be included as standard features.
3. Hotkey configuration
For traders with a little more experience, the use of hot keys can be an essential part of good trading software.
Hot keys enable the trader to send pre-customised actions/orders to the market by tapping a specific set of keys.
For example, ‘ctr + S’, can send a 500-share short sell market order in seconds. There’s no need to type in specific information to level two, saving valuable seconds.
Hot keys are highly customisable and can be used for everything, from getting in and out of positions to annotating or drawing lines on your chart without having to click the mouse to access each annotation button.
4. Fast news and customable alarms.
Knowing why a company’s stock price has changed is crucial when deciding whether or not to take a trade to the long or short side.
TradeZero’s software has a free live feed to Benzinga, enabling you to access news headlines and articles in a matter of seconds on any given ticker.
Ultimately, when it comes to day trading, time can amount to money – so the faster you can digest relevant information, the faster you can make a good trade.
5. Ability to access and reserve locates (shares to short)
TradeZero is a broker that specialises in short selling. To help traders place short trades it has a system to locate, reserve and credit back shares of hard-to-borrow stocks. There are several advantages to having software, like this.
Locating: many brokers simply don’t have access to the majority of hard-to-borrow stocks. If your broker has access, as TradeZero does, that’s already an advantage.
Reserve: Some brokers allow you to short hard to borrow stocks, but you can’t reserve shares in advance, you can only borrow the shares upon executing the trade. By this time, the inventory may have ran out leaving no shares for you. Reserving shares in advance, ensures they are always at your disposal.
Credit: TradeZero is the only company that enables you to credit back your shares. During the trading day, if you have locates you no longer want or need, you can mark all or a portion of your locate shares for credit by pressing the 'Credit' button next to each located symbol's quantity.
By marking your locate shares for credit you will make the locate shares available on a first come first serve basis to other TradeZero clients looking for locates in the same security. You can recoup up to 50% of your initial locate cost when another TradeZero client purchases your locates marked for credit.*
Any locates that you mark for credit are automatically and instantly placed in a locked state, preventing you from initiating a new short position with those locates.
That’s a wrap
By now you should have a clear idea of what elements and features create a great trading software platform. If you’d like to learn more about TradeZero’s trading software options you can click here. This also includes our free, online stock trading platform, ZeroFree.
If you have any other questions, you can message our customer service team 24/7 through our website’s chat service.
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