Very well set. When I looked at TradeLink some time ago came to the realizaton that I had found the worst written code ever. It is a lot of pieces - not saying worthless - but it looks partially like a transfer from c (variable naming etc.) and it would not pass any code review I have ever seen.
You ought to answer this since you have been trumpeting the cause of Tradelink. Why do you like Tradelink, what are the specific features that you like in Tradelink? Don't duck the question - ducking the question makes you look a little dishonest.
No. Started working on my own, got distracted, got in touch with some other traders that had started now we have our own inhouse code share solution. The weak point right now is still real trading - they had an approach similar to TradeLink. We started reworking it from the bottom up.... starting with backtesting etc. Now the last part going into rework is trading. So far it is a cmd line application (where you use cmds to start and stop strategies). That has obviously some problems (runs on desktop), so the rework on that will end with a windows service (+ web based control panel). Tons of side features to fix on the way (like isolating strategies into strategy pools that run as separate appdomains). But no, I do not see anything out there that is decent. It starts with backtesting. Look at tradelink - no optimization is there that is worth talking of, and backtests are not really there either. No cluste,r, not analysis, no data warehouse. Yes, it is open source, yes you can build it all, but that is saying like "hey, I bought a house, now i have to go to a shop, buy the parts and build it". There are some parts, but they are not really "there" in an integrated and usable form.
The hard (for some) truth is that you gotta shell out real dollar (talking about 10s of thousands of dollars) to purchase a solution that gets the job done, or you have to write it from the ground up, with third party libraries and add-ins. Nothing gets around that, and of course those who believe the holy grail exists are now chasing after the newest kid on the block, systematized trading. They think you buy a program for a grand, turn on the engine and in comes the money. Well, I will not comment on such retarded state of mind but all I say is a) pay up for it, b) or build your own.
Not true. Anyone who says an off the shelf program like Multicharts or Ninja or Amibroker can't be used to develop and successfully trade profitable trading strategies is either making a sweeping generalization or is simply ignorant. Yes, you can't do order book modeling in such tools, you can't trade vol using such tools, you can't do HFT using such tools, you can't do basket trading using such tools etc. etc. So, there are limitations. But if you want to trade on 1 minute+ timeframe and less than 20-30 symbols, these tools get the job done. And they cost just a grand!!!!
No, they are not. At least ninja has no order book. That means you executions are hogwash guesses. Stop hits may be well off in thin markets. We took a SERIOUS difference once we moved our simulator into evaluating the complete order book. We talk - in some circumstances - of significant differences in fill price. Not the strategy, the simulator.
We are in agreement here and we are talking exactly the same thing. Simulating order book won't give good results in these softwares. I was just responding to the poster who made a sweeping generalization that 1k softwares are completely worthless.
Well, I have 2 people here full time working on strategies. In ninja we managed to make 3-4 backtests PER WEEK. we ha d serios problems with backtests taking days. We have one trading approach that has 80k trades per year - just an idea someone has and we have not even been able to backtest it (out of memory on 32gb ram). In our Framework, we do 3-4 optimizations per night. We never loose data due to a ninja crash (very common). Optimizatios and backtests are repeatable (ninja gave us 3 results on 3 machiens -- failing data downloads, nice). If power fails, machines take up new work when they come up. The queue is db driven - so we can put in backtests for a week and do not ahve to watch the machiens every 15 minutes to check which backtest is finished. To give you an idea about how large it is - this morning I had one node out of memory. We allocate 1gb / core.... and strategies took more than that. Should not happen. Now, I can grab one of those jobs and have an easy command line that I Can put into a shell and then use a memory profiler to see why this particular strat thngs it uses so much memory (mind you, we only run 1 week jobs, so no, it should not use 1gb). In ninja, it is terrible. There is a HUGH productivity difference. NInja was pretty much total standstill. We do more work now in a weekend than we did back then in a month.