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Company type | Corporation (TradeStation Group. Inc) |
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Industry | Financial services |
Founded | 1982 (formed as Omega Research, Inc.) [1] [2] |
Headquarters | , |
Key people | John Bartleman, President [3] |
Products | Electronic trading platform |
Services | Broker Stockbroker |
Parent | Monex Group |
Website | tradestation |
TradeStation Group, Inc. is the parent company of online securities and futures brokerage firms and trading technology companies. It is headquartered in Plantation, Florida, and has offices in New York; Chicago; Richardson, Texas; London; Sydney; and Costa Rica. TradeStation is best known for the technical analysis software and electronic trading platform it provides to active traders and certain institutional trader markets. TradeStation Group was a Nasdaq GS-listed company from 1997 to 2011, until it was acquired by Monex Group, a Tokyo Stock Exchange-listed parent company of one of Japan's leading online securities brokerage firms.
TradeStation was founded by Cuban-born brothers William (Bill) and Rafael (Ralph) Cruz, who sought to create a way to design, test, optimize, and automate their own custom trading strategies. Bill started studying trading at the age of 16, and two years later, the brothers pooled $2,400 to open a futures trading account. They gathered trading data to create charts, which were used to test trading ideas. Bill began to test strategies himself without the benefit of formal coding knowledge, a process that resulted in the development of EasyLanguage, the company's proprietary coding language for non-specialists.
Bill and Ralph decided to start their own company, then known as Omega Research. The brothers focused on selling tools that would give clients without a technical or computer programming background the ability to program and test their own trading strategies. In 1987, they released System Writer, a software product that enabled users to develop and “back-test” their own trading ideas using historical market data. In 1989, System Writer Plus was released with new and innovative charting features, which the publication Commodity Trader Consumer Reports likened to “the system trading software equivalent of putting a man on the moon.” [4]
In 1991, Omega Research released TradeStation and, three years later, struck a licensing deal with Dow Jones Telerate to offer TradeStation as a premium service to Telerate's institutional clients worldwide. In 1997, Omega Research conducted an IPO and became listed on the Nasdaq National Market. The company launched an online version of its product in 1999. In 2001, the company converted itself from a trading software company to an online securities brokerage and renamed itself “TradeStation”. The software's back-testing, order-generation and trade execution capabilities were fully integrated for both securities and futures markets in 2003. In 2004 and 2005, TradeStation became a self-clearing equities and options firm. An entire industry eventually grew up around TradeStation's software, including seminars, publications, and user networks. [5]
TradeStation Group, Inc.’s principal operating subsidiaries are TradeStation Securities, Inc. and TradeStation Technologies, Inc. TradeStation Group is a wholly owned subsidiary of Monex Group, Inc., one of Japan’s largest online financial services providers.
TradeStation Securities, Inc. is a member of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), Securities Investor Protection Corporation (SIPC), Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC), Options Clearing Corporation (OCC) and the National Futures Association (NFA). It is a licensed securities broker-dealer and a registered futures commission merchant, and is also a member of the Boston Options Exchange, Chicago Board Options Exchange, Chicago Stock Exchange, International Securities Exchange and NASDAQ OMX. The company’s technology subsidiary, TradeStation Technologies, Inc., develops and offers strategy trading software tools and subscription services. Its London-based subsidiary, TradeStation International Ltd., a Financial Services Authority-authorized brokerage firm, introduces the UK and other European accounts to TradeStation Securities, Inc.
Monex Group, Inc. provides online investment and trading services for retail and institutional customers around the world through its subsidiaries, including Monex, Inc. in Japan, TradeStation in the U.S, and Europe, and Monex Boom in Hong Kong.
Its main subsidiary, Monex Inc., one of Japan's largest online securities brokerages, provides financial services to its nearly one million individual investors. Monex Group's services also cover M&A advisory, debt and equity underwriting, asset management focusing on alternative investments, investment education, and other investment banking functions in Japan.[ citation needed ]
The TradeStation analysis and trading platform is a professional electronic trading platform for financial market traders. It provides extensive functionality for receiving real-time data, displaying charts, entering orders, and managing outstanding orders and market positions. [7] Although it comes with a large number of pre-defined indicators, strategy components, and analysis tools, individuals can modify and customize existing indicators and strategies, as well as create their own indicators and strategies using TradeStation's proprietary object-oriented EasyLanguage programming language. Traders can also access hundreds of TradeStation-compatible products created by independent third-party developers through the TradeStation TradingApp Store, as well as access strategy trading ideas submitted by the TradeStation community in the EasyLanguage Library.
TradeStation supports the development, testing, optimizing, and automation of all aspects of trading. Trading strategies can be back-tested and refined against historical data [8] in simulated trading before being traded "live". TradeStation can be used either as a research and testing tool or as a trading platform.
A large number of third-party developers develop TradeStation-compatible products. Since Tradestation is a development platform, a custom trading program can be developed called a trading system or trading strategy. If any trader has an analysis technique or potentially profitable strategy he would like to have developed, he can either write his own strategy in EasyLanguage or have his trading system developed by third-party developers. Traders can also take advantage of the TradeStation TradingApp Store, an online marketplace of ready-to-use add-on products built to run on the TradeStation platform by independent developers.
Australian Securities Exchange Ltd (ASX) is an Australian public company that operates Australia's primary securities exchange, the Australian Securities Exchange. The ASX was formed on 1 April 1987, through incorporation under legislation of the Australian Parliament as an amalgamation of the six state securities exchanges, and merged with the Sydney Futures Exchange in 2006.
A futures exchange or futures market is a central financial exchange where people can trade standardized futures contracts defined by the exchange. Futures contracts are derivatives contracts to buy or sell specific quantities of a commodity or financial instrument at a specified price with delivery set at a specified time in the future. Futures exchanges provide physical or electronic trading venues, details of standardized contracts, market and price data, clearing houses, exchange self-regulations, margin mechanisms, settlement procedures, delivery times, delivery procedures and other services to foster trading in futures contracts. Futures exchanges can be integrated under the same brand name or organization with other types of exchanges, such as stock markets, options markets, and bond markets. Futures exchanges can be organized as non-profit member-owned organizations or as for-profit organizations. Non-profit, member-owned futures exchanges benefit their members, who earn commissions and revenue acting as brokers or market makers; they are privately owned. For-profit futures exchanges earn most of their revenue from trading and clearing fees, and are often public corporations.
The Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) is a global derivatives marketplace based in Chicago and located at 20 S. Wacker Drive. The CME was founded in 1898 as the Chicago Butter and Egg Board, an agricultural commodities exchange. For most of its history, the exchange was in the then common form of a non-profit organization, owned by members of the exchange. The Merc demutualized in November 2000, went public in December 2002, and merged with the Chicago Board of Trade in July 2007 to become a designated contract market of the CME Group Inc., which operates both markets. The chairman and chief executive officer of CME Group is Terrence A. Duffy, Bryan Durkin is president. On August 18, 2008, shareholders approved a merger with the New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX) and COMEX. CME, CBOT, NYMEX, and COMEX are now markets owned by CME Group. After the merger, the value of the CME quadrupled in a two-year span, with a market cap of over $25 billion.
The Tokyo Commodity Exchange, or TOCOM, is an energy exchange in Tokyo, Japan. TOCOM is operated by Tokyo Commodity Exchange, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Japan Exchange Group (JPX). Under the Commodity Derivatives Transaction Act of Japan, It is a licensed commodity exchange operator that provides market facilities for trading of commodity derivatives, physical commodities and commodity price index futures.
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Intercontinental Exchange, Inc. (ICE) is an American multinational financial services company formed in 2000 that operates global financial exchanges and clearing houses and provides mortgage technology, data and listing services. Listed on the Fortune 500, S&P 500, and Russell 1000, the company owns exchanges for financial and commodity markets, and operates 12 regulated exchanges and marketplaces. This includes ICE futures exchanges in the United States, Canada, and Europe; the Liffe futures exchanges in Europe; the New York Stock Exchange; equity options exchanges; and OTC energy, credit, and equity markets.
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In finance, an option is a contract which conveys to its owner, the holder, the right, but not the obligation, to buy or sell a specific quantity of an underlying asset or instrument at a specified strike price on or before a specified date, depending on the style of the option.
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Monex Group, Inc. is a financial services company based in Tokyo, Japan. Monex Inc., its main subsidiary, engages in online securities trading, with approximately 2 million accounts. In 2010, the company integrated its operations by making ORIX Securities Corporation its wholly owned subsidiary through a share exchange. As a result, ORIX Corporation became the largest shareholder with a 22.5% stake and became an equity method affiliate of ORIX Corporation. TradeStation, its US subsidiary, provides securities, options, futures and cryptocurrency trading services. The Monex Group acquired Coincheck, which is one of the largest crypto exchanges in Japan, in April 2018.
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