Yes, I trade off charts, but the way their order entry is set up is pretty bad. Are you listening, @NinjaTrader_Ray? I bought this add-in which allows for 1/2 click trading for order entry. https://www.volaty.com/products/indicators/clicker/ With Ninja you actually need to right click and navigate a long menu in order to find your order entry on the charts. Very cumbersome and definitely not user friendly for live trading. Often, you get the feeling that Ninja was developed by coders and not traders. Like I said I've been considering options, but at the end of the day I'm sure other platforms have issues as well. Now that Ninja once again is working stable with me and without any issues I'm just going to stick with it for now. My recommendation is that you just keep testing it a bit and seeing if you like it. Another cool thing with Ninja is that it's very easy to program stuff and if you need a custom indicator there are a lot of people out there who can help you create what you need if you don't program yourself. Good luck and feel free to keep us updated. Especially if you try to use it with IB as I may be interested in that myself at one point. I used IB for futures in the past, but their margins are a bit high now, I think.
I just love the TOS interface. It was just such a great design from the start that it has never needed to change all that much. Ninja I have always thought has the most pretty charts though. AMP and IB are great as well of course. At this point, the often mentioned companies have been battled tested and have stood the test of time. They are all pretty great in their own way. There is a ton of trading software from 15 years ago that has gone the way of the dodo bird. A few that I can't even remember the name of now that were overly complicated, poor UI, buggy and ultimately out of business. At this point with such low requirements to get going there isn't much reason to not have multiple accounts across the mature platforms IMO.
I also have problems with NT8 ordering system. More specifically with their DOM. DOM really sucks and is much more complicated then most other platforms. Rithmic and Multicharts have a much better DOM. I must admit that the rest of NT8 works perfectly for me.
----- After setting up NT, experimenting with it a bit, I'll get Clicker too. Seems like a great add on and makes it all the better trading with one click off the chart. I'm also interested in the Market Replay feature they have. Have you used Replay? Btw I trade the micro emini futures (mainly MES). The MES currently has a intra day margin 1460/contract with IB. Is yours lower?
That's another problem with the NT development team. There's a ton of user requests asking for very specific and basic improvements like the Clicker. It should have been extremely easy for them to implement it. Chart trader is okay for calm swing trading. Not for intraday trading. That's when you need the Clicker. But if you're willing to live with these issues and make your own workarounds like I've done, you can be very happy with Ninja. I tried using the Replay a few times, but it seemed very buggy and laggy. Maybe I did something wrong? So, not much experience with that one, but I suppose it should work out fine. My intraday margin is far lower. For 1 MES/ES the intraday margin is $50/$500 respectively. I don't use intraday margin, though. Usually I like to have about $10K per ES contract and I generally trade only one contract these days. I know many moved away from IB for futures trading as their margins are high and especially during heightened volatility it can become even twice or thrice of what it is normally. ninjatrader_futures_commissions.pdf
I used for many years Replay and it worked very well. Just needed it to see in realtime the variations of the values of some indicators. You see in realtime when, and at what price, lines cross or values are reached. Without market replay you have in fact only screenshots of the situation at one specific moment. Lines can in realtime cross several times and at the end of the timeframe end as not crossed. That can cause big problems, at least for me.
I like Motivewave so far. I bought the orderflow edition. You can use it with IB`s datafeed (not tick based) or with dxfeed or barchart. Dxfeed´s CME, Top of book, costs $19,00
After following these steps and connecting IB to NT, will I then have access to the futures emini Charts on NT with live feed & will I get access to Market Replay?
Try Quantower. Extremely fast & stable. C# language, development team is easily accessible via their site and/or Discord. free to use via AMP/CQG else a license of your own allows for Rithmic. they're working on a connection to TT as well which I think isn't far off.