we need to be friends lol i have just gotten Ami Broker and working thru it myself. trying to wrap my head around the architecture of the program. i see it's so strong and far better than MC and TS but i'm like that flea in a jar, where the jar is limitations, work arounds etc. that have driven me crazy over the years. i am fully committed to fully learning AB. but it helps get a prod every now and then from someone it comes more natural to.
Please let me know how long that takes. I would move to AB if there were an EL to AFL conversion utility.
There is a AFL code wizard which I purchased with AmiBroker. It has helped and there is so much code on the AB forums etc. lot's of help, as good or better than TradeStation.
Guys, I fear we are hijacking thread here. But since you quoted me... the version you purchase from them is a lifetime one plus two years of further free lifetime upgrade versions which get developed afterwards. After those two years you don't have to pay further upgrade from them if you don't need the new features inbuilt. You can upgrade to another two-year free upgrades period whenever you like to. Also AB is far ahead that the existing version you own is fine enough for majority of use cases. Anyway if you still would decide to upgrade every two years for new free lifetime version period then you would still end up cheaper after 10 years. 339 + 4*169 = 1015 after 10 years. If you upgrade every three years then it's $850 after 11 years. How many people survive 11 years? How much junk have you bought for 100 bucks every three years in the past? Anyway I'm out of this thread. On previous page I was just answering to a question.
After further review, I discovered that it would require a lot of code to build trading systems with Amibroker that perform trades thru Interactive Brokers. With Multicharts, the broker interface is essentially a plug-in requiring no special code when moving from one broker to another. This is a HUGE advantage...and it alone could account for the license price difference. Amibroker badly needs to move to a transparent broker interface....
I'm a professional programmer with more than 20 years experience writing trading systems and trading interfaces, with significant experience programming C, C++, C#, Java, AmiBroker, InteractiveBrokers, and EasyLanguage. And 10 more languages including NVidia GPU programming, which is what I'm focusing on right now. All this experience makes me...old. To answer the original question, there is no question I would get Multicharts.Net over MultiCharts. C# is a well documented professional language. PowerLanguage, aka EasyLanguage, despite its age is just so poorly documented compared to C#. As far as AmiBroker goes, I think it is an excellent, cost effective product, with innovative backtesting engine. You can write DLL's if you need to. However...I use TradeStation and EasyLanguage. Yes, EasyLanguage ain't great, but with the advent of Object Oriented EasyLanguage, and the fact that you can write DLL's, there is nothing I've ever wanted to do that I couldn't do...and it has the following advantage which is HUGE to me. TradeStation manages both the data and the broker interface. Their tick data goes back a year and a half on most symbols. Their minute data goes back 10 years. When I used AmiBroker and InteractiveBrokers, I wrote my own broker interface in Java (and Ruby), because I just didn't trust the one provided by AmiBroker. It took a ton of time. And then there was also a ton of time necessary to manage the data. I prefer using that most precious resource - time - to develop actual trading systems. As far as the language goes, well... for me, after awhile, it just doesn't matter that much. You just have to figure out how to loop, how to to do conditionals, what the available library functions are, etc. Same for every language. Most of the learning curve is learning the libraries. Not much different with EasyLanguage or Java or Haskell. I did look at NinjaTrader, which is based on C#and they now have an integrated broker, but their historical data just doesn't match TradeStation. It's just really nice, when you have an idea, to not have to worry about the data.
Thanks for that post LEL.... re: " but with the advent of Object Oriented Easy Language".... I believe Multicharts 11 now has some OO features in it's EL implementation.
I am having a huge problem with MultiCharts right now, it seems that the data will not stay updated in MultiCharts at all. They have continually had data problems maybe it's because they accept some manay data sources that they don't do any of them very well.