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Both of the pro programs I use run significantly slower on M1 compared to Windows Intel. I don't think that the additional cores of the M1X will solve the problem. This makes for somewhat of a conundrum as I had been looking forward to the battery life and thermals of the M1X. I also have to consider the potential that Apple will stop selling the Intel model after they introduce the Apple Silicon model.

The programs I use are Fidelity Active Trader Pro and Ameritrade Think or Swim.

Everything else that I've tested runs fine on Apple Silicon. There are a few other programs that I haven't tested yet.
Interesting…speedwise, ATP runs great on my M1 Mini, better than my Xeon 2012 Mac Pro. It’s inherently unstable on both machines though.

Honestly I think the problem is with Fidelity, not the M1.

I can’t really speak to ToS.
 
Interesting…speedwise, ATP runs great on my M1 Mini, better than my Xeon 2012 Mac Pro. It’s inherently unstable on both machines though.

Honestly I think the problem is with Fidelity, not the M1.

I can’t really speak to ToS.

ATP runs best on Windows because it's a native Windows application.

It runs on macOS Intel via Crossover. But it's still an Intel executable so it has two translation passes - Windows to macOS and Rosetta 2.

Crossover/WINE doesn't give you 100% compatibility. It's usually around 95-99%. Sometimes it takes Fidelity some time to get you running on the latest version of macOS or the latest version of Crossover.

I have a very complex ATP setup. It typically takes ten to fifteen minutes to load on my big Intel box (i7-10700, 128 GB RAM, etc.).
 
I'm using ToS on my Intel desktop for now until the M1X comes out. The M1 systems don't have enough horsepower and RAM for me to run my full trading setup and office setup. The procedure does work but the directory changes with every update so I need to write a script to automatically deal with that. I will take a look at it later on today.

I also run Fidelity Active Trader Pro on the Windows desktop. I don't think that there's a good way to get good performance out of that program unless Fidelity does a rewrite.
Have you found ThinkOrSwim (TOS) works better on Windows vs. Mac? Rather, if I like MacOS much more than Windows is it ok get a Mac or will it sacrifice performance on TOS vs. getting windows machine?
 
Have you found ThinkOrSwim (TOS) works better on Windows vs. Mac? Rather, if I like MacOS much more than Windows is it ok get a Mac or will it sacrifice performance on TOS vs. getting windows machine?

ToS works fine on Windows or Mac. It works fine on M1 as well if you use a native Java. Ameritrade doesn't provide that but you can get it to use native Java with a little effort.

Fidelity ATP is always going to run better on Windows as it's a native Windows x86 program. It has to go through Crossover/WINE on macOS Intel and has to go through Crossover/Wine and Rosetta 2 on macOS/Apple Silicon. Crossover typically doesn't provide 100% compatibility so you can see crashes and freezes.
 
Moderator Note:

Posts have been deleted. Stay on topic M1 not working as hoped.
 
ToS works fine on Windows or Mac. It works fine on M1 as well if you use a native Java. Ameritrade doesn't provide that but you can get it to use native Java with a little effort.

Fidelity ATP is always going to run better on Windows as it's a native Windows x86 program. It has to go through Crossover/WINE on macOS Intel and has to go through Crossover/Wine and Rosetta 2 on macOS/Apple Silicon. Crossover typically doesn't provide 100% compatibility so you can see crashes and freezes.
I have some friends who say M1 Macbook Pro works great on TOS (running through rosetta). What issues are you running into with the M1 chip? Lag? Delay in quotes? Etc.
 
I have some friends who say M1 Macbook Pro works great on TOS (running through rosetta). What issues are you running into with the M1 chip? Lag? Delay in quotes? Etc.

ToS can be thought of as an operating system. You can allocate up to 128 GB of RAM with it to run complex analysis or even programmatic trading.

My setup involves 88 Realtime charts. Most people, from what I've seen, run one chart at most.

The CPU cost, from my performance analysis, is triple with Rosetta 2. This makes sense given that Rosetta can't save the translated code. ToS runs in Java and Java is interpreted code. Java also uses a JIT though I'm not sure if it's used 100% of the time or if it does analysis to see if execution will benefit from JIT first. This interpretation or codegen is done on the fly so Rosetta 2 can't translate and store it so that it doesn't have to translate it the next time around.

Translation works best when you have a static executable to translate as you translate as you run it and store the result so that you don't have to translate code that has already been translated. Eventually you translate the entire executable so that you can just run natively.
 
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Both of the pro programs I use run significantly slower on M1 compared to Windows Intel. I don't think that the additional cores of the M1X will solve the problem. This makes for somewhat of a conundrum as I had been looking forward to the battery life and thermals of the M1X. I also have to consider the potential that Apple will stop selling the Intel model after they introduce the Apple Silicon model.

The programs I use are Fidelity Active Trader Pro and Ameritrade Think or Swim.

Everything else that I've tested runs fine on Apple Silicon. There are a few other programs that I haven't tested yet.


Curious what MacOS are you on for your Intel build? I'm trying to decide if I should gamble upgrading my Intel iMac from Catalina to Big Sur. I'm using Active Trader Pro and I that is a delicate program to say the least. I was wondering if the bugs have been worked out for Big Sur. The motto "it just works" doesn't apply for the financial 'grown up' apps that remind me of the "Im a Mac Im a PC" from a decade ago with a stoner kid and middle age guy in a suit warning me not to use Macs for this.
 
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Curious what MacOS are you on for your Intel build? I'm trying to decide if I should gamble upgrading my Intel iMac from Catalina to Big Sur. I'm using Active Trader Pro and I that is a delicate program to say the least. I was wondering if the bugs have been worked out for Big Sur. The motto "it just works" doesn't apply for the financial 'grown up' apps that remind me of the "Im a Mac Im a PC" from a decade ago with a stoner kid and middle age guy in a suit warning me not to use Macs for this.

I'm using Mojave on my 2015 Intel MacBook Pro. I was using it on my 2014 as well but that has been loaned out and is currently running High Sierra. My Late 2009 iMac is running High Sierra. My 2014 Mac didn't run well with Big Sur. I have tried Monterey on the MacBook Pros and it runs fine so I would upgrade them to Monterey when it goes release. The 2014 MacBook Pro requires an OpenCore patch to run Monterey.
 
My 2014 Mac didn't run well with Big Sur.

Got it.....I'm a 2014 iMac with Catalina but the fusion drive is going to be an issue for Big Sur. I think at this point I am just going to bite the bullet and get a proper Windows build for this. I was trying to stay on Apple but the issues I am having just trying to get my stupid iMac to add external monitors has been a nightmare and Big Sur might have been my way out if it addressed the Catalina bug(I could buy an external SSD and boot from it to test but I am not going to bother).
 
Got it.....I'm a 2014 iMac with Catalina but the fusion drive is going to be an issue for Big Sur. I think at this point I am just going to bite the bullet and get a proper Windows build for this. I was trying to stay on Apple but the issues I am having just trying to get my stupid iMac to add external monitors has been a nightmare and Big Sur might have been my way out if it addressed the Catalina bug(I could buy an external SSD and boot from it to test but I am not going to bother).

I played around with the 2020 iMac 27 at The Apple Store back in May and I was quite impressed. It felt as fast as my M1 mini and that was the 6-core model. The 8 and 10 core models outperform the M1 in multicore. The GPU options on the 2020 are quite good as well. There's a thread in the iMac forum on people that are still buying or considering the 2020 iMac 27. If I had to buy a Mac that ran Intel - that would be the one.

You might want to give Monterey a try. I hooked up my 2014 MacBook Pro to an external SSD and installed it on that and ran it for several weeks and it was very nice. I experimented with hooking it up to 4K and QHD monitors and it ran but got hot. 4k monitors on older machines generally run hot in my experience. Extra RAM can help a lot if you're using a Fusion drive. I have a Late 2009 iMac 27 with 16 GB of RAM and it runs fine because everything that I do is in RAM.
 
I played around with the 2020 iMac 27 at The Apple Store back in May and I was quite impressed. It felt as fast as my M1 mini and that was the 6-core model. The 8 and 10 core models outperform the M1 in multicore. The GPU options on the 2020 are quite good as well. There's a thread in the iMac forum on people that are still buying or considering the 2020 iMac 27. If I had to buy a Mac that ran Intel - that would be the one.

You might want to give Monterey a try. I hooked up my 2014 MacBook Pro to an external SSD and installed it on that and ran it for several weeks and it was very nice. I experimented with hooking it up to 4K and QHD monitors and it ran but got hot. 4k monitors on older machines generally run hot in my experience. Extra RAM can help a lot if you're using a Fusion drive. I have a Late 2009 iMac 27 with 16 GB of RAM and it runs fine because everything that I do is in RAM.

Yeah that last gen Intel iMac is impressive though at this point any new Apple I buy is going to be ARM or I'll just go to Windows full time.

Does Active Trader Pro run on Monterey? There is a pop up message when I start it saying its not supported.

I might give that a shot on an external SSD. I only need it with a small external screen(22" HD)
 
Yeah that last gen Intel iMac is impressive though at this point any new Apple I buy is going to be ARM or I'll just go to Windows full time.

Does Active Trader Pro run on Monterey? There is a pop up message when I start it saying its not supported.

I might give that a shot on an external SSD. I only need it with a small external screen(22" HD)

I didn't try ATP or ToS on Monterey. ATP is dependent on WINE and Crossover and either of those having a problem could mean that ATP won't run on it. I've had versions of ATP that wouldn't run before and I contacted Fidelity and they resolved it for me suggesting a different version of something. Don't recall which. It's always just easier to run ATP on Windows which is what I am doing right now.
 
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