Hi All, I trade equities and I've been with Tradestation for some time but am thinking of moving to IB because frankly, Tradestation as a brokerage is not great - expensive & crap short list. Does anyone trade equities using Ninjatrader with Interactive Brokers or attempted to do so? What are your opinions? Thanks, Splat
Thanks - I'm aware that its possible. Was wanting to know if anyone does it and if there are any pitfalls.
OK Let me clarify ..... the reason for my question is that Ninjatrader is primarily used to trade futures so I was wondering if there could be any problems using it as a front end to IB to trade equities.
If you want to day trade a handful of tickers. It is possible. It would probably be better to gain TWS proficiency. Running the market analyzer with indicators for a dozen plus names, you better get a data feed like Kinetick.
You'll connect NT to IB through either IB's terminal API (aka TWS-API) or through the IB gateway. You must have one running and authenticated to trade. TWS itself is a full-featured broker interface; the latter is just a gateway. TWS might serve as an adequate replacement for NT. You'll probably end up using TWS because you'll be able to see your NT orders on TWS as you trade them. I've never jad a problem shorting, but I only short S&P companies. Not sure what else you're looking for from a broker. Perhaps list your priorities. Performance is reasonable for a retail broker. Don't expect to do any HS/HFT trading through TWS or the gateway. For higher performance applications, they offer a FIX interface, but it's a $1500/month minimum. Their data prices are a la carte, depending on your needs. They are not tick data; a VWAP of about 250ms of data points. It's fine for retail use. Fees are USD0.005/share, 200 share minimum. You can trade 200 shares of Google, or 200 of a penny stock for USD$1
Interesting. The forum thread above us is discussing the new IBKR real-time feed starting March 1. One can always be hopeful that it affects the quality of the feed and the occasional difficulties that NT users have with IBKR. Hopefully, it puts the squeeze on IQFeed and Kinetick.
Thanks xandman. Firstly, I have used Kinetick before although don't know how reliable the data feed is compared to say Esignal. The second thing I am concerned about is the reliability and especially the speed of the Ninjatrader equities trade execution data transfer into TWS.