I suggest getting Ninja trader. Great support and all free until you need to trade live. Their managed strategy approach handles tons of the stuff under the hood. .net also really easy to code in.
I'm torn between Ninja and Multicharts. Can anyone comment on the pluses and minuses of these two platforms ?
Never used MultiCharts so have no idea. If Multi charts free? Ninja is until you need to trade live, excellent support and fantastic platform. The only downside, you can not trade options with it. Ninja is also very well designed for custom auto strategy development.
Both platforms are garbage. They are limited in terms of feature set and one ends up having to write a full fledged order management system anyway. I have not even mentioned that there is a risk that your algorithms are shipped straight away to the vendor in case they embed some hidden data grab. You would not know about that unless you are a CS expert.
Really? So how do you manage partial orders, order cancellations, logging, reporting, risk management, data backfills , .....???
Supported? Unless you write it none of the issues I mentioned is supported by any of the off the shelf platforms. At the least not properly.
Have you even looked???? http://ninjatrader.com/support/helpGuides/nt7/ Using above link just search for managed vs unmanaged approach. Get your facts straight before posting BS.
Volpunter has been on the warpath against any platform that doesn't cost $10k+....or wasn't built custom from scratch (millions of lines of code). Omigosh, if he saw Quantopian's platform, he'd probably throw up. I am definitely going to look at Ninja, despite the fact that I could jump right into Multicharts since I am an EasyLanguage programmer.