Ok, I set up Interactive Brokers a couple weeks back, and thought I was going down that road, because I found their education area on the site to be pretty robust, and I saw that you could connect it to TradingView (TV), which is the charting software I want to use. But now I'm not so sure. Sounds like a lot of people don't bother connecting IBKR to TV anyway, and I'm starting to wonder if Thinkorswim (TOS) is a better first choice for those of us living in the states.
Trader Workstation for IBKR feels SUPER dated, but they also have the IBKR Desktop, which looked modern, and when I checked out options trading in there (for paper trading of course), it was REALLY intuitive. I really liked it, and it even identified option spreads automatically. Not sure if TOS can do that, but I really like the interface. It felt like a great way to get a hands-on feel for options orders.
But then I found people talking about IBKR Desktop and saying that it's buggy and often delayed/laggy, so most people still use Trader Workstation (TWS). If IBKR Desktop isn't that great, I figured I might try TOS instead and see if it's more modern/intuitive than TWS. After all, I am not in a rush to trade, and it sounds like once you're committed to a broker, it's hard to change.
Anyway, just wondering what everyone else thought? I'm still planning to use TradingView as my charting software, but I may switch to TOS. I'm hoping its options ordering is very clear though, like I saw in IBKR Desktop.