Hi, I am an automated trader. Trading mostly FX and Futures trough IB TWS with Ninjatrader. I am getting so fed up with all the small and also bigger bugs and problems and unreliability of Ninjatrader. Eg. again 2 days ago it started plotting tomorrows data already today. Haven been wasting time on 10+ similar issues like this. So anyone made the jump from NT to Multicharts and found it more reliable, mature and stable? I am not yet ready to start with something like tradelink or similar. because I still like to use some of the built in frame-works from eg. NT or Multicharts and some of my ideas still come from charts.
I tried Ninja as trial and have to say that the backtesting had some issues I was not willing to accept. I don't remember exactly what it was but some methods could not be executed in backtesting, only live (connected to a tick feed, but either sim or real). This tells quite a bit about their backtesting engine and it's realism. For MC, I am quite happy so far but really hate their DRM. It connects to some outside machines quite often - so you have to trust them that they don't channel your self-written code through that and run it themselves. Couldn't they just send people a custom SSH key that unlocks the app? Anyway... . So my current approach is to backtest in MC (while blocking the app with completely with a firewall) and execute via my self-written IB interface. Another method is to write a DLL for multicharts which interacts with a program that gives the signals. Thus MC keeps track of your market position. But this may give additional delay... .
One more: MC has a free discretionary trader interface - if this is your style of trading I think you may be happy with it.
LOL. yeah when i read that i thought "that's like blake lively showing up at your house naked and you say to her 'umm i can't right now - it's time for me to go on ET and post a pic of my trading station".
My suggestion to all traders in 3 steps: 1. Turn off internet connection 2. Load your favorite backtesting or TA program 3. If it fails to load or execute because it cannot connect to the internet uninstall it and never use it again Simple, 1, 2,3 ...done
MC seems like a mature product. The same outfit has been doing software for traders for a lot of years. Before MC they produced add-ons for Tradestation and their stuff worked 100% in all my experience with them. I Beta tested some of it and even the Betas were reliable... I don't see much advantage to using Easy Language type of stuff though. Currently I write scripts in C++ oriented packages and basically, I can produce a new indicator much faster than I ever could with Easy Language...
Absolutely echo this. Although I use MC for back-testing as it works well when offline. Just the live mode doesn't but when it comes to real executions I rather trust my own code which is covered 100% by unit tests and I have just myself to blame. Ok, maybe my broker if their API sucks... .