I'm currently using Tradestation 9.1 and I am frustrated by Tradestation's inability to effectively support for trading futures pairs and spreads. Does anyone know of a trading platform that is better suited for futures pairs and spread trading (specifically ine that would allow backtrsting, optimization, and automation of trading strategies for futures pairs). I am new to the forum and look forward to the insights and experience of the community. Thanks in advance for your help.
What is your price point ? Trading Technologies and CQG Integrated Client is not an option for you if you can't spend a couple thou per month. And there are some other options that get much pricier... The fact of the matter is that the strategy is used by bigger and well capitalized prop firms and funds and commercials by and large. ( which is good for you, actually. ) If you want to economize, you will have to do some development work yourself given your listed requirements. I have had some clients in the past who were very good with Ninja Trader, but had difficulties using it with spread combinations. Things hopefully have improved, but I cannot be definite about Ninja. Maybe someone with specific demonstrated skills using spread combinations and Ninja can contribute. IMO, if you can live with seperate platforms for charting/modeling and for execution, then you have many more choices and pricing flexibility.
Try to ask for the TS 4.0 platform. It is pretry old-fashioned, won't help you with optimalization and backtesting really much, but supports futures spread trading. Sentrix
http://www.deepdiscounttrading.com/TradingPlatforms.html comprehensive list of all trading platforms that do exchange traded spreads with costs. There are quite a few low cost options that do back testing on spreads.
So it seems quite easy to get historic spread data into a back tester, what systems work better on spreads than outrights?
CTS T4 seems to be used mostly by the commodity guys in chicago in the prop environmnet - so should have loads of spread features. Ive heard good things about it.