Another poorly thought through web application update

Overnight a new version of the web based trading app was released. C’mon! Do you guys actually talk to people who use it before you make changes all willy nilly because you’ve again made changes which make the web site platform barely usable! (as a note, I have trading algorithms running and I use the web site to make position adjustments manually during this turbulent market.) Here are the problems that I’ve seen right now:

  1. If you have a limit order entered, the only way to change the limit price is to cancel the order, go to the Home page, and then enter a new order. Totally ridiculous!

  2. It’s nice being able to have custom column settings but there’s no way in the positions page to show the daily % and $ change, only the Total % and $ change. So, the only way to know how the position is doing today is to compare it to the previous day’s closing price or manually keep track of it yourself. Seriously???

  3. On the orders page, you can no longer toggle between showing the open orders and the closed orders. This is helpful for a variety of reasons. There was a button called “refresh” or “reload” or something like that. When I pressed it, I was now able to see both the open and closed orders. A bit confusing but at least I can now see the closed orders. But, that “refresh” button goes away after you click it once and now it’s awkward monitoring just the open orders…

Stop making your application less useful whenever you make a change! Maybe talk to an actual user before you make a change, before you’ve even changed one line of code. You’d end up with a much better product with a lot less invested programmer time…

Dave

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hi David! Sorry to hear about your experience. Would you mind jumping on a call to discuss these points further?

Sure, email me and I’ll give you my digits.

I did find out that my #2 is somewhat inaccurate. When you click on the Columns button, it doesn’t include an entry for the daily $ or % change, but if you use “select all”, it does add those columns.

can you book through this link please? Calendly - Mahmoud Sherif

I agree, not only has functionality been removed the formatting is worse. I get changes are coming and hope a lot of functionality gets added but in the mean time can we at least not remove whats already there?

It seems like the devs are just trying stuff to see what works. Don’t you have a dev environment for that?

I have had to switch back to the old UI multiple times to use this product over the last few months. I am just glad thats still available.

Hello! Mahmoud from the product team here. What kind of flows do you use the old UI for more than the new UI?

Would you mind jumping on a call sometime next week to discuss your feedback and hear your recommendations? Here is a Calendly link you can book through. Thank you!

Primarily I use the orders page to adjust limit position exit orders which are generated by our trading bot. For that I use the closed orders page (to look at what I had already adjusted as limit exit orders that hadn’t closed the previous day).

I also sometimes use the Account → Activity page when there are a lot of trades that have occurred and to make sure there’s nothing that I missed.

I use the positions page to see how things are trending but I notice that this page has real time updating so I try to be nice such that I take a look and then leave my screen displaying the orders page to limit the amount of data that I’m pulling off the Alpaca site.

At the end of the day I use the Home page to determine the gain for the day as it’s easier that way than look at each individual trade that opened, is still open, which trades closed, etc.

Other pages, I generally don’t use. With this new version, I’m using the Home page a lot more since I need to cancel an order and create a new one when I’m adjusting an exit limit order.

Yes, I’ll be happy to join a call next week to talk about things. I have a relatively quiet week of meetings myself next week and only have calls scheduled for:

Wednesday, 3pm ET for 30 minutes.
Thursday, 9:30am ET for 1 hour
Thursday, 4:00pm ET for 1 hour

Other than that I’m pretty open.

Best Regards,
Dave Carter

Hello,

Things I have noticed in the new UI:

Positions:
The removal of the column Today’s P/L(%) Today’s P/L($) as well as having Avg Entry disabled by default. I use the information from all of the existing columns under positions.

The spacing of the columns and rows are large and I have no control over it; I want the option to have tight rows and columns, ideally they would be adjustable.

Orders:
Removed a ton of columns, I used most of them. Why not give me the option to select which ones I want?
No easy way to review cancelled or closed orders anymore?? I use that daily.
Same issue as positions, columns and rows are large, and there is no way to decrease the size, I want tight columns and rows like the old UI.

Account > Configuration
The removal of No Shorting toggle?

The overall look and feel of the New UI is not better, it’s just different. I can tell that it is better performing so that is appreciated, some progress there.

What I really want to see is more options for making the trades. I predominantly trade via API, but it would be nice to be able to make a bracket order, or extended hours trade via the GUI from time to time.

Thanks!

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Hello,

And now the new UI Orders defaults to All, it should default to the Open orders.

Also I need to be able to modify Orders like I can in the old UI. Overall this has not been a good experience, the old UI behavior was fine, the new UI should at least match what the old UI did then add in the new things.

I am switching back to the old UI for the 10th+ time until you actually get the new UI to match the minimum functionality of the old UI.

Hi Salu. Sorry to hear about your experience.When you say modify open orders, what do you mean?

In the old UI I can replace an order, I.E. “modify” the qty or price and it creates a new order and cancels the old.

Like I mentioned, the new UI should at least mirror the old UIs functionality, then add in new improvements.

You can still do that by clicking on the order_id (you will have to make sure you can display that column though).

Thanks for the feedback and we will make sure to make this clearer for you and the rest of the users. Do you use the button on the orders table on the overview page?

Okay yeah that works by clicking on the ID column, which was hidden by default.

The Home/Overview page doesn’t show the combined Qty in the one line, so if you are averaging up/down over a period of days and managing multiple symbols it’s not obvious what the Qty is without scrolling down and doing the math.