I am testing a lot of charting programs last time (AmiBroker, NeoTicker, SierraCharts, NinjaTrader, MultiCharts and other) and imho MultiCharts looks better from other. Many people say that it is slow, but I'm testing MC 2.1 with eSignal data feed and it works really fast! Any problem yet..... price is reasonable too. The only rival is AmiBroker. Seems to be faster than MC but charting is rude. NeoTicker is extremally slow! Sierra not suits my needs at all. Ninja is intresting for trading but charting is not as good as in MC. Remember it's just my subiective opinion
I don't need to use old backtester. Let's use new (slower) one: Here is a task for you: Perform portfolio-level backtest including symbol scoring and ranking by RSI value, over 10000 symbols 15 years of EOD data. Ten simultaneously open positions. That's backtesting of roughly 40000000 (40 million) data points. AmiBroker time on SINGLE core CPU (2GHz) v5.01, local database: 59 seconds. Oh... I seem to forgot that you can not do that with your current version of Multicharts (no portfolio testing at all!) Frankly I am sick and tired with this discussion. It does not lead anywhere. Those who tried both softwares can choose the software that is better for THEM easily. Just give them a chance to evaluate ON THEIR OWN. It is a pity that you don't just devote your time on serving YOUR CUSTOMERS instead of wasting time on stupid benchmarks. As several customers of YOURS said - they are NOT concerned about speed of benchmark. They are concerned about every day use speed and you should simply listen to your customers instead of spending days on childish benchmarks. Just go sit down and improve Multicharts IB interface, improve responsivity of Multicharts. That's what your customers are complaing about in this thread. Don't waste time on stupid things that won't grow your business. This is a friendly advice from someone who is serving customers for 7+ years.
How is the charting rude to you??? Perhaps you encountered what I did the 1st time I launched AB. Visual Confusion...... After a little time invested in getting to know it, I am quick fast and nimble with it. I have a ton of customized charting formulas for how I like to look at the data. AB is sooooo easily customizable.... AND fast. It performs nicely on my little Dual Core 1.83Ghz Mac wether I am under a VM or direct boot via bootcamp.
First - I'm fan of AmiBroker too Second - AB charting allows You create ony very simple AT study. I think main goal of this software is very fast backtesting. And it is really fast!
I'm a customer of multichart and tradestation. Despite the latest improvement on multichart, I still find tradestation to be 4 times faster (with 1 core) in optimiztion with my strategies than multichart (with 4 cores). I find this ridiculous as multichart is using 4 times as much resources. Maybe their benchmark of simple startegies being faster than tradestation is true, but it's definitely not the case when working with real world strategies. I hope tradestation will rollout a multi-core version soon so that I can forget this problem once and for all.
Andrew you have wonderful ability NOT to listen to your customers. Your customers (that are using latest versions of your software) say that Multicharts is slow. Slow in opening, slow in backfilling, slow in switching intervals. Go back and re-read your customer feedback. Why don't you take my friendly advice and improve your software instead of wasting time on useless discussion. As for "contradicting yourself" I proposed a portfoli test for one and only reason - you wrote that "old backtester gives my product unfair advantage". So I did not want that unfair advantage. And you can perform this test with pre 5.0 version if you want. It does not matter. The key point is that currently your users are simply NOT able to backtest real-world multiple security strategies. We don't need any benchmark because you have functionality MISSING from multicharts. This is not racing. This is about TRADING. Traders don't care if backtest runs 10% faster or slower. If they need they buy faster computer. But if your software forbids them from actually testing real-world strategy then you have a problem. And it is NOT timing problem. You seem completely disconnected from your customers and their needs. You are focused on gigahertz, 16 cores, etc while they are focused on trading. Did you ever trade at all ??? I wrote already that CUSTOMERS decide what they want. Everyone can take a trial and check on their own. On their own machine. And decide if they prefer to pay $229 for software (AmiBroker) that is fast in every area, mature and feature rich, or they want to spend $899 (multicharts) on something that is slow and in early development phases that still has long way to be full-featured. I have to quit this discussion. I am currently off for market open (I am _trader_ not only developer). Don't want to waste my time on unprofitable and useless discussion.
I have tried Tradestation, Multicharts, Ninja and Quotetracker. Quotetracker by far has the best Graphical User Interface. You can zoom in and out with the slider without losing your original perspective. THis is something NO OTHER program can do. you can draw trendlines faster than any program. but don't try to move your trendlines if they are bunched up. It is difficult to pick out a line in QT. Multichart is still buggy. The tool bars double up unannounced. In the middle of the trading day, a second set of tool bar would show up on your chart, taking up valuable screen space. You try to remove it, but you can't because it is dead. You have to restart your program If your datafeed (or internet) goes offline for a few minutes, Multichart would not know how to handle the disruption. It will just continue to chart when the data comes back on. It won't show a gap in your chart. You won't even know the data was missing, and that your trendlines are not in the right place anymore. Tradestation is mixed blessing.
Quotetracker: each chart is an individual window. YOu open as many charts as you want, and drag them to anywhere on your screen, or to another screen if you have multi-monitors. Multichartrs: all the charts must be within the Multicharts program. (it is like working with Windows 3.11) If you need a chart in another monitor, you have to start another instance of Multicharts. Say, you want to put 2 charts side-by-side for comparison. If you have opened one chart in one instance of Multichart, you cannot open the same chart again in another instance of Multicharts. You have to close the first chart and reopen it in the other instance. That could take one minute, or to over half an hour if you run into pacing violation problem with IB.