I wanted to start a new topic on recent problems with major retail brokers.  With the recent dropping of commissions and subsequent massive influx of new retail traders (for many reasons), the major retail brokers have all run into slow downs, outages, backlogs and other failures.  I've been aware for sometime that my fills on both TOS and IB have had intermittent problems.  The recent thinkorswim outage was a real pain to me and I didn't get hurt by it, just massively inconvenienced, no doubt others were hit in the pocket book.  I'm a big fan of TOS, mainly because I've been on their system for a long time, their rates aren't the greatest but they don't have any other fees.  The problem I see is that there is no end in sight for these brokers to be overloaded.  Little or no commissions, zero or very little account size, and massive new resources needed on their part to solve the problem.
 
I don't have a problem with a minimum account size and I would even be willing to pay a little more in fees or even a monthly tithe for a platform to get better fills and steadier service.  I'm starting the broker search now, I'm not looking forward to any of this, I was happy with what I had but I don't think I have that any more.  I'll post my efforts here if anybody is interested and would appreciate feedback from others as well.

I am wondering if anyone ever used or still uses the spread hacker in Thinkorswim. When they say this particular vertical spread or calendar has 70% chance of winning for example, how accurate is that and can I trust it?

Hello. I have a few questions/comments about backtesting in TOS.

1. If you select that you entered a trade in TOS using the thinkback tool, is the price you enter supposed to be based on the opening price for legs in the options spread for that day?

2. When you close the trade does thinkback assume you are getting the mid of closing price for the legs in the options spread that date?

3. Is it the closing price for the underlying that day?

I always assumed it was based on closing prices, but I just wanted to check.

Also, I see this as a major issue with backtesting in TOS, you can only base it on whatever open/close condition it uses.

Thank you!

Richard