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The desktop version of Charles Schwab's expert trading platform, thinkorswim. Or TWS from Interactive Brokers. Basically these are trading platforms designed fo

by kccqzy 2y ago

The desktop version of Charles Schwab's expert trading platform, thinkorswim. Or TWS from Interactive Brokers. Basically these are trading platforms designed for day traders and the highest end of the retail investors market. These necessarily have to good high-information density UIs: imagine trading an option showing all strikes (SPX has hundreds of strikes), both calls and puts, and showing the option Greeks (delta/gamma/vega) and pricing information (bid/ask) for each option. Then you need to give users ability to quickly send trades. You need to support complex strategies: an iron condor has four legs for example. You need to support complex orders like stops and limits and combinations thereof and these need to be built via an UI with THEN/AND/OCO relationships. Some will want a fast-updating candlestick chart; others will want to see the order book; still others will want to plot probabilities or expected prices using Black Scholes model. It's complex. You should sign up for paper trading and see these UIs feel like.

saratogacx 1y ago
I was thinking the same thing. I've used TOS for years (2010) and it is crammed with info while still being fairly easy to use. The fact that you can also group multiple UI elements to always show the same symbol (change one, they all follow) lets you go a bit nuts in the analysis dashboards you can make. The TOS mobile app is also not too bad. A couple of years ago they tried to add some less data-dense info to the main screen and the they got a review riot which caused them to make the view optional and untouched sense then. I've got a lot of respect for them being able to keep that UI stable for so long.
mysteria 1y ago
One thing I like about TWS is that related widgets (candlestick chart, newsfeed, L2 table, etc.) can be easily linked or separated. For example I can link a chart and a newsfeed together and if I switch the chart to a specific stock the newsfeed will switch over as well. Another commenter has mentioned that this is a TOS feature as well. Those widgets can be resized and moved around on a grid and I can create different tabs with separate layout for each.

by kccqzy 2y ago

saratogacx 1y ago

I was thinking the same thing. I've used TOS for years (2010) and it is crammed with info while still being fairly easy to use. The fact that you can also group multiple UI elements to always show the same symbol (change one, they all follow) lets you go a bit nuts in the analysis dashboards you can make. The TOS mobile app is also not too bad. A couple of years ago they tried to add some less data-dense info to the main screen and the they got a review riot which caused them to make the view optional and untouched sense then. I've got a lot of respect for them being able to keep that UI stable for so long.

mysteria 1y ago

One thing I like about TWS is that related widgets (candlestick chart, newsfeed, L2 table, etc.) can be easily linked or separated. For example I can link a chart and a newsfeed together and if I switch the chart to a specific stock the newsfeed will switch over as well. Another commenter has mentioned that this is a TOS feature as well. Those widgets can be resized and moved around on a grid and I can create different tabs with separate layout for each.