Active Trader Pro is finally building a native Mac Program

[pshufd]

I just sent an email requesting to be part of the beta program and I suspect that it will be some time before it actually launches but this is the worst program that I have to run on Apple Silicon, to the point where I run it on Windows at home. The program is about two decades old and only runs on macOS via WINE and Apple Silicon via WINE and Rosetta 2. And it runs really poorly. Crashes from time to time as WINE does not provide 100% compatibility and it uses over 8 times the RAM on Apple Silicon compared to Windows. They will be rolling out features in the betas so this could take quite some time to get to a release version but I'm game to try it out. I would not mind removing my Windows desktop from my desk. I can get by with four monitors instead of five.

How about others? Is there some program that you use that uses a lot of resources that still hasn't been natively ported yet?

 

[sdwaltz]

w about others? Is there some program that you use that uses a lot of resources that still hasn't been natively ported yet?

Active Trader Pro...lol. It's so bad that it's to the point that I've considered moving my personal stuff over to Schwab so I can use ToS.

I'm a financial professional and this is very welcome news. How can I request to be in this beta?!

 

[pshufd]

Active Trader Pro...lol. It's so bad that it's to the point that I've considered moving my personal stuff over to Schwab so I can use ToS.

I'm a financial professional and this is very welcome news. How can I request to be in this beta?!

Log in to Fidelity

www.fidelity.com

I run ToS on my Mac Studio but they only came out with their native kit a year ago. I currently run ATP on an old Windows desktop. It runs better there than on my Studio.

The Reddit announcement is at

https://www.reddit.com/r/fidelityinvestments/comments/1fz1gcf

 

[sdwaltz]

Log in to Fidelity

www.fidelity.com

I run ToS on my Mac Studio but they only came out with their native kit a year ago. I currently run ATP on an old Windows desktop. It runs better there than on my Studio.

The Reddit announcement is at

https://www.reddit.com/r/fidelityinvestments/comments/1fz1gcf

I'm now on the waitlist - thanks!

 

[Ray2]

It’s been a while but the last time I dealt with Fidelity's IT department, they were a decidedly anti Mac group. Makes one wonder about the intelligence of a financial services company that shuns a higher income group.

 

[pshufd]

It’s been a while but the last time I dealt with Fidelity's IT department, they were a decidedly anti Mac group. Makes one wonder about the intelligence of a financial services company that shuns a higher income group.

It seems to me that they were going after volume the past ten years. They have been heavily focused on mobile and getting the 20-30 year olds who aren't PC-centric. Fidelity has a huge amount of captive business in their 401k and 403b products. It doesn't help that the competition has had problems too. ToS was only ported to Apple Silicon last October and the StreetSmart Edge mess resulted in a lot of unhappy customers having to learn a new platform.

I think that part of the reason for doing a native program now is that it hits Windows too. Windows 11 ARM has to run under translation on the Qualcomm ARM chips so there's a performance hit there. People complain regularly on the Reddit FidelityInvestments sub and that does get reported back to management.

I'm running ATP on my iMac Pro and it's a better experience than on my Mac Studio. It's best on Windows but I'd like to get my Windows desktop off my desk.

 

[Ray2]

It seems to me that they were going after volume the past ten years. They have been heavily focused on mobile and getting the 20-30 year olds who aren't PC-centric. Fidelity has a huge amount of captive business in their 401k and 403b products. It doesn't help that the competition has had problems too. ToS was only ported to Apple Silicon last October and the StreetSmart Edge mess resulted in a lot of unhappy customers having to learn a new platform.

I think that part of the reason for doing a native program now is that it hits Windows too. Windows 11 ARM has to run under translation on the Qualcomm ARM chips so there's a performance hit there. People complain regularly on the Reddit FidelityInvestments sub and that does get reported back to management.

I'm running ATP on my iMac Pro and it's a better experience than on my Mac Studio. It's best on Windows but I'd like to get my Windows desktop off my desk.

Good explanation, thx. If it’s shaking up Fid's IT group it’s long overdue.

 

[Madhatter32]

I just sent an email requesting to be part of the beta program and I suspect that it will be some time before it actually launches but this is the worst program that I have to run on Apple Silicon, to the point where I run it on Windows at home. The program is about two decades old and only runs on macOS via WINE and Apple Silicon via WINE and Rosetta 2. And it runs really poorly. Crashes from time to time as WINE does not provide 100% compatibility and it uses over 8 times the RAM on Apple Silicon compared to Windows. They will be rolling out features in the betas so this could take quite some time to get to a release version but I'm game to try it out. I would not mind removing my Windows desktop from my desk. I can get by with four monitors instead of five.

How about others? Is there some program that you use that uses a lot of resources that still hasn't been natively ported yet?

Estimated timeline? I have long since given up on ATP. Use ToS instead. ATP was so bad I wondered how Fidelity could plausibly market it as a legitimate Mac solution. I felt it was false advertising.

 

[pshufd]

Estimated timeline? I have long since given up on ATP. Use ToS instead. ATP was so bad I wondered how Fidelity could plausibly market it as a legitimate Mac solution. I felt it was false advertising.

I've no idea but they will be rolling out features in betas so I don't expect the released product to be soon. Fidelity has a ton of captive customers and their traditional customer base is more mutual funds than active trader.

 

[pshufd]

It just went live and I installed it. They don't have settings yet for fonts and text size so it's not usable to me yet. I didn't play with charting.

I get the feeling that this is going to take a fair amount of time.

 

[Madhatter32]

It just went live and I installed it. They don't have settings yet for fonts and text size so it's not usable to me yet. I didn't play with charting.

I get the feeling that this is going to take a fair amount of time.

Well, if it doesn't freeze, crash or shutdown windows by itself, then it's a major improvement already. Thanks for the updates.

 

[pshufd]

I migrated my charts from ATP to ATPB last week and I am running it live starting today. The nicest thing about it is that I can run it on Apple Silicon and it doesn't kill my RAM usage. It literally uses one-tenth the RAM. I was running ATP on my iMac Pro as it runs better there than on Apple Silicon but now I have my trading stuff on the Studio and the native Think or Swim and Active Trader Pro Beta setup only uses 20 GB of RAM. CPU usage is around 20%. I think that it was about 35% with ATP.

This will be really great on my M1 Pro MacBook Pro when I am traveling as it will mean much better battery life - maybe I can get in a full trading day now.

There's still a lot of functionality for Fidelity to add but I can live with this for now. Anything that I can't do on the platform I can do on the website.