Brokerages
TradeStation
Introduction
QuantConnect enables you to run your algorithms in live mode with real-time market data. We have successfully hosted more than 200,000 live algorithms and have had more than $22B in volume traded on our servers since 2015.
TradeStation was founded by brothers William (Bill) and Rafael (Ralph) Cruz in 1982 as Omega Research, Inc. In 2001, the company converted itself from a trading software company to an online securities brokerage and renamed itself "TradeStation" with the mission to "create the ultimate trading experience". TradeStation provides access to trading Equities, Equity Options, and Futures for clients in over 150 markets, 34 countries, and 27 currencies. TradeStation also delivers custody, clearing, execution, and billing on behalf of registered advisors.
To view the implementation of the TradeStation brokerage integration, see the Lean.Brokerages.TradeStation repository.
Account Types
TradeStation supports cash and margin accounts. To set the account type in an algorithm, see the TradeStation brokerage model documentation.
To create a TradeStation account, follow the account creation wizard on the TradeStation website.
Asset Classes
Our TradeStation integration supports trading the following asset classes:
You may not be able to trade all assets with TradeStation. For example, if you live in the EU, you can't trade US ETFs. Check with your local regulators to know which assets you are allowed to trade. You may need to adjust settings in your brokerage account to live trade some assets.
Data Providers
You might need to purchase a TradeStation market data subscription for your trading. For more information about live data providers, see Datasets.
Orders
We model the TradeStation API by supporting several order types, order properties, and order updates. When you deploy live algorithms, you can place manual orders through the IDE.
Order Types
The following table describes the available order types for each asset class that our TradeStation integration supports:
Order Type | Equity | Equity Options | Futures |
---|---|---|---|
Market | ![]() | ![]() | ![]() |
Limit | ![]() | ![]() | ![]() |
Stop market | ![]() | ![]() | ![]() |
Stop limit | ![]() | ![]() | ![]() |
Time In Force
We model the TradeStation API by supporting the following TimeInForce instructions:
Day
DAY
GoodTilCanceled
GOOD_TIL_CANCELED
GoodTilDate
good_til_date
Updates
We model the TradeStation API by supporting order updates.
Handling Splits
If you're using raw data normalization and you have active orders with a limit, stop, or trigger price in the market for a US Equity when a stock split occurs, the following properties of your orders automatically adjust to reflect the stock split:
- Quantity
- Limit price
- Stop price
- Trigger price
Margin
We model buying power and margin calls to ensure your algorithm stays within the margin requirements. If you have more than $25,000 in your brokerage account, you can use the PatternDayTradingMarginModel
to make use of the 4x intraday leverage and 2x overnight leverage available on most brokerages from the PDT rule.
Slippage
Orders through TradeStation do not experience slippage in backtests. In live trading, your orders may experience slippage.
To view how we model TradeStation slippage, see Slippage.
Fills
We fill market orders immediately and completely in backtests. In live trading, if the quantity of your market orders exceeds the quantity available at the top of the order book, your orders are filled according to what is available in the order book.
To view how we model TradeStation order fills, see Fills.
Settlements
If you trade with a margin account, trades settle immediately
To view how we model settlement for TradeStation trades, see Settlement.
Deploy Live Algorithms
You must have an available live trading node for each live trading algorithm you deploy.
Follow these steps to deploy a live algorithm:
- Open the project you want to deploy.
- Click the
Deploy Live icon.
- On the Deploy Live page, click the Brokerage field and then click from the drop-down menu.
- Click on the Account Type field and then click one of the types.
- Click on the Environment field and then click one of the environments.
- Click on button.
- On the TradeStation website, login to your account to grant QuantConnect access to your account information and authorization.
- Click the Node field and then click the live trading node that you want to use from the drop-down menu.
- (Optional) In the Data Provider section, click and change the data provider or add additional providers.
- (Optional) Set up notifications.
- Configure the Automatically restart algorithm setting.
- Click .
The following table shows the account types:
Type | Description |
---|---|
Cash | Cash account type |
Margin | Margin account type |
Futures | Futures account type |
DVP | Delivery versus Payment (DVP) account type. |
The following table shows the supported environments:
Environment | Description |
---|---|
Simulator | Trade with paper money |
Live | Trade with real money |
In most cases, we suggest using the QuantConnect data provider, the TradeStation data provider, or both. The order you set them in the deployment wizard defines their order of precedence in Lean.
By enabling automatic restarts, the algorithm will use best efforts to restart the algorithm if it fails due to a runtime error. This can help improve the algorithm's resilience to temporary outages such as a brokerage API disconnection.
The deployment process can take up to 5 minutes. When the algorithm deploys, the live results page displays. If you know your brokerage positions before you deployed, you can verify they have been loaded properly by checking your equity value in the runtime statistics, your cashbook holdings, and your position holdings.