Are your concerns specific to NinjaTrader or a general question regarding all platforms that offer the ability to develop your own systems (AmiBroker, Multi-Charts, etc, etc)? In my experience, NT seems to be a pretty good front end (charting, etc). The same argument might be raised about brokers "riding your coat-tails." In all honesty, they have an easier time of determining who is making cash than NT does since they actually have access to your accounts. In any event, if you are really concerned about the 3rd party platforms "snooping" your actual trades/core logic, there are ways around that. It's not actually rocket science, and if you are familiar with c#/Windows you've probably already arrived at that conclusion yourself.
To be honest, everybody I know says that there is no waterproof protection. When I read your comment I assume that you know a waterproof protection. It would be interesting for many people to know how exactly you can protect yourself. Can you give the information needed?
I'm assuming most people who use NT use some sort of technical indicators. Normal operation keeps your main algorithm in NT, but you don't actually have to do that. You can use NT to generate all your little "micro" technical events and pipe those outside the application to where your actual processing of the algorithm takes place. Even order creation can take place externally, so you are pretty much "under the radar", so to speak.
The reason why NinjaTrader does not spy because small traders just lose. More than 90% of small traders lose! They just lose! P.S Goldman Sach trading platform and dark pool spy on hedge funds because they just win.
I own several copies of Ninja and was used for number of years, for 99% of the public that do normal trading, it is a good product, and you can encrypt your code I believe, haven't used in year and half as staff eventually built charting/platform to do much more than Ninja does. They not going to spend years on creating what very few traders want, not cost effective. But I believe that those who think they have some incredible system not been trading long, your broker/clearing firm most likely can do far worse to you than Ninja folks.
It depends on the broker you trade through. After Title's issue, we move to a broker registered in Hongkong,it has more than 40 years history,and the oldest broker in HK. It's name is Victory Securities. I'm not sure they accept single person or not, you can try. If not, just pm me or email me. Let me try.
Your comment caught my attention. I'm a pretty satisfied client of NT, however I always listen any idea to get better my safety. So, can you give an idea how could you "pipe those outside the application to where your actual processing of the algorithm takes place " ? I never heard of this before. Thanks