re: Automated trading software....

How is it different than using GTC limit and conditional orders? Does it actually send orders based on anything other than price movement? Is it an algo?

ETA: I assume this is the same software you posted about the other day, so I'll just leave my reply here. I'm in the trading technology industry, working with hedge funds and large asset managers so I'm fairly knowledgeable about the functionality traders use and how they make decisions. I just watched the demo online, thoughts below.

First off, very little of the functionality offered is something you can't already do with your run of the mill advanced or conditional order on somewhere like E-Trade or Scottrade. It would certainly require more manual work on the trader's part, but any serious day trader would likely prefer to manage this themselves. The ability to create and share rules is pretty neat, but I don't personally think anything in there is going to lead to you some secret recipe for success. More than likely, it's just going to leave you with a huge commission bill. Why do you think they were able to sign so many of the discount brokers? It certainly costs them to hook into this system but is well worth the extra commissions this system will help them drum up.

The canned strategies they provide(what was used in the demo) are absurd. They showed the trade history of a mock account that had been automated for 2 years buying/selling 100 shrs of Dow stocks under $50 when they made certain price moves. It was up about 30% but the PL of each trade didn't seem to be netted for the cost of commissions, and they we only making $30-$100 per trade, so that is a massive chunk, before even considering short-term tax rates.

All in all, I like portions of the system and would probably use it to trade and track PL intra-day if it were free or cheap, but the cost is way too high($3500/year?!?!) for what it offers. I definitely wouldn't recommend it to anyone considering their main selling point is their automated strategies, which seem like horse shite to me. If they could make this more of a broker sponsored system(meaning they get a portion of the commissions) and get the price point below $1000, they would probably do really well with the stay-at-home day traders(something I think is an awful idea as well).