In this presentation, hosted on the futures.io forum we took a look at the Jigsaw Tools in a stand alone environment. A new trading platform that we are calling RapidTraderPro.

This is the first public showing of the new tools. We’ll discuss what the tools do and also explain why we are doing things the way we are.

We’ll discuss the architecture of the product, the unique features and take a look at where Jigsaw is heading in the future.

Building a stand alone platform wasn’t something I’d planned from the start. Mostly because we had a nice, niche product and a stand alone platform is a huge chunk of work So it’s worth going over the reasons I thought the industry needed yet another trading platform.

The number 1 reason is the demand. Or rather the amount of times people call and ask if we can support their trading platform. We get requests all the time for Tradestation, Sierra, Agena support and numerous other platforms. People want the functionality Jigsaw gives them but they want it on their platform. So ultimately we can either support dozens of platform or let people run Jigsaw stand alone and use whatever charting platform they want.

As each new trading platform comes to the market, they all seem to do exactly the same thing. The same charts, same indicators, same order types and same markets supported. There’s a lot of features I’d like to see in a trading platform and it doesn’t appear that these are areas of concern for most retail platforms. The focus seems to be charts and backtesting. The focus is on doing what everyone else is doing.

So we now have our own platform. It’s an execution platform, we have no plans to make it a charting platform. That’s been done a hundred times and I don’t see the need to do it again.

In other words, it’s not intended to be a “one size fits all platform”. It is a focused platform for execution. We will focus on Order Flow & execution features for those that need advanced execution features. We’ll also be focusing specifically on execution for Futures Traders. There’s a big difference in how futures, stocks and options traders execute. That’s why in the professional world, there tend to be different leading platforms for each market type. So once again, not only will we specialize in execution, it’ll be execution for Futures. That is after all, what we know best.

We also have the issue that the platforms we support aren’t popular in the prop world and we often get prop firms calling us asking when we’ll support a platform they can actually use. Bottom line is prop firms won’t let certain retail platforms into the building because they are considered unreliable.

This doesn’t mean that the plug in model is dead and won’t be supported. We are now supporting the Tradovate platform and another platform is coming soon. We aren’t going to stop supporting the plug ins for the existing platforms either. We will be focusing on putting new functionality into the stand alone product though because we have the most flexibility there.

The biggest advantage for us is that we have no limitations at all when we have our own platform. We don’t have to worry about compatibility with 4 or 5 different platforms when we implement each feature, so the pace at which we can implement cool new stuff will increase.