Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Fidelity Active Trader Pro on M1 MacBook Pro
- Thread starter mdawhit
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
My daughter tried to install it this morning and the installation failed. I'm going to send a note to Fidelity.
Note sent. I don't have a lot of hope as their technical support generally stinks.
I asked her to try installing Think or Swim. I'll take a look at trying to install ATP myself. I can call Fidelity tomorrow since their email response is pretty poor.
I installed Think or Swim and ran it though I didn't place any trades.
Same with Active Trader Pro.
The M1 MBA is a fantastic machine. We've had it for two days but this is the first time I've used it.
Big Sur rearranged all of the settings icons so I had to hunt for settings.
Same with Active Trader Pro.
The M1 MBA is a fantastic machine. We've had it for two days but this is the first time I've used it.
Big Sur rearranged all of the settings icons so I had to hunt for settings.
Last edited:
Active Trader Pro runs like trash on my M1 Air, sits somewhere between 100-250% CPU usage and is unusably laggy.
Thanks for the data point. It normally uses about 12% CPU on my i7-10700 though it's much higher on startup. The Apple measurement of CPU is per core, not the whole system so 100% would be about 25% and 250% would be 62.5%. ATP is using Crossover so you have Windows Emulation running on top of Crossover running through Rosetta 2 Translation.
ATP runs like a pig on it's native platform (Windows Intel) and I have a beefy Windows system. It's not a surprise that it may not run well through two layers of translation/emulation.
You might try ToS as that uses far fewer resources compared to ATP - some people get an account at Ameritrade just for ToS.
I'd suggest putting a note in the thread for applications. It might be a pinned thread.
Will-do. I rarely read this forum anymore, I was Googling to see if anyone else was having issues with it and happened upon the thread since it is the top result.
I run two charts with a few indicators, two option chains with a few strikes, and a positions list. Nothing crazy, so it is unfortunate.
I run two charts with a few indicators, two option chains with a few strikes, and a positions list. Nothing crazy, so it is unfortunate.
I added an entry in that thread with a link.
I'm a heavy user and run it with 17 charts with several indicators for each chart along with market display and portfolio. That's why I use a 4k Monitor with it. ATP regularly hangs, crashes and is slow as a dog on Windows and it's worse on Intel Macs.
No problem. I needed to know anyways for planning. My choices for hardware are Windows, macOS Intel and macOS AS and I needed to know how both run with AS for it to be an option.
What I do is I run a dedicated Windows virtual machine and use Microsoft Remote Desktop to access ATP. Current host is a Dell Latitude E5540 running Ubuntu and VMPlayer, W10 Guest, 4 GB RAM and 2 vcpu's
I have a number configurations(screen count) depending on my work location when I need to make trades if I am not at my actual desk.
Currently using 3 screens on my 2018 MBP, onboard, and 2 with dongle's.
Came across this thread as debating on getting an M1 and needing native support for ATP and 3 screens.
I have a number configurations(screen count) depending on my work location when I need to make trades if I am not at my actual desk.
Currently using 3 screens on my 2018 MBP, onboard, and 2 with dongle's.
Came across this thread as debating on getting an M1 and needing native support for ATP and 3 screens.
I just tried out Think or Swim with my production environment on my M1 mini. It is significantly slower than on my Intel Windows system. This is a bit of a surprise as the Geekbench 5 multicore score is only about 15% higher on my Windows box and the M1 single-core score is much, much higher than on my Windows system. I will continue to run Think or Swim on Windows. I did some searching and found forum comments that it runs in Rosetta 2.
Last edited:
I called TD Ameritrade tech support to see if they could tell me where the JRE as I wanted to try swapping out the x86 JRE with the M1 JRE. They could not tell me where the JRE was located and I couldn't find it on my own though I will still keep looking. I disable spotlight searching so I can't just search for it on my system.
I thought that they used Oracle JRE from some webpages that I found but it's possible that they use Azul Zulu OpenJDK for all of their platforms. Their Linux instructions require you to install Azul Zulu OpenJDK manually so it would make sense that they went over to Azul Zulu on all of their platforms. There seem to be more newer releases with this company compared to Oracle.
An engineer there said that swapping JREs shouldn't work but would be curious as to what I find. So this is a bit of a midnight oil project and I'll just keep running on Windows during the day.
I thought that they used Oracle JRE from some webpages that I found but it's possible that they use Azul Zulu OpenJDK for all of their platforms. Their Linux instructions require you to install Azul Zulu OpenJDK manually so it would make sense that they went over to Azul Zulu on all of their platforms. There seem to be more newer releases with this company compared to Oracle.
An engineer there said that swapping JREs shouldn't work but would be curious as to what I find. So this is a bit of a midnight oil project and I'll just keep running on Windows during the day.
I had a look at the MBP 16 and, realistically, the best option to run my programs when mobile is the Dell XPS 17 with 4k screen and 11th gen Intel CPU. I priced one out and it's within spitting distance of the 2019 MacBook Pro 16. The MBP 16 would benefit greatly from an upgrade to Intel's 11th gen CPUs. There's quite a difference between 9th gen and 11th gen in terms of thermals.
I don't want to run all of my other stuff on Windows though.
I don't want to run all of my other stuff on Windows though.
This is very discouraging to me. I was looking forward to the 16" MBP with the M-1, but I need it to run ToS at least as responsively as it does on Intel. This is an essential program for me. I have already given up on Fidelity's Active Trader Pro because that barely runs even on the Intel based Macs.
The 11th Gen Intel CPUs are a big improvement from the 9th Gen.
ATP is a Windows executable and runs on macOS Intel through WINE and takes a performance penalty for that. I'd be willing to eat that on an 11th gen Intel CPU but not on the ninth gen.
Geekbench 5 for the 2019 MacBook Pro 16 with i9-9880HK is 1,090 for Single Core and 6,835 for multicore. The score for the i9-11980HK in the Dell XPS 17 is 1,659 for Single Core and 8,993 for multicore. So there are significant improvements in performance that you'd expect from a die shrink.
That i9-11980HK is slightly slower in single-core than the M1 but significantly faster in multicore. I expect that M1X multicore will be around 14,000 and nothing else is going to touch that but the problem is multiple software translation/emulation layers does cripple CPU performance. For reference, the AMD Ryzen 5900H has Single Core score of 1,519 and multicore score of 9.018.
tom's guide said that they got over nine hours of battery life out of it which matches their rated battery life. My guess is that M1X will get over twenty and I don't think that any x86 laptops with even half the performance can touch that. But I'd be happy with nine hours. At some point, ATP and ToS will have Apple Silicon solutions.
A review by The Everyday Dad says that the Vapor Chamber cooling system keeps temperatures around 75 degrees at 100% CPU. I prefer my systems to run below 50 degrees but I don't ever run my systems anywhere near 100% to keep them cool.
One last note is that I can run virtualized macOS on Windows or Linux systems so I have access to the programs I have that only run on macOS. So I can be on the road with my trading programs and macOS applications as well and wouldn't have to bring two laptops.
Last edited:
How many chart studies are you running simultaneously?
It runs on my i7-10700 Windows desktop that has 128 GB of RAM and comparably spec'd for SSD and GPU but it takes about fifteen minutes to start up in the morning. I suspect that performance aspect is server-side.