When is Ninjatrader 8 coming out? Is it true that the Ninja Platform is unstable and that it is mostly sought after by new trader not professionals?
NT8 is in alpha and will be in beta sometime this year... for an actual GA (General Availability) release... if NT7 is any indication you are talking years out. You will need to define what "professional" means to you... You will not find at any institutional desk (buy/sell side) NinjaTrader... you will find the likes of Bloomberg, Reuters, Redi, XTrader, CQG, etc... and you will also find a lot of custom OMS/OE systems (basically in house created tools for risk mgmt, pre-trade clearing, position offsetting, etc.) ... but if by "professional" you mean any "prop" (and I use that term completely loosely) then you will find a variety of tools depending on the product being traded and the market connectivity they will have... so you might find sterling, lightspeed, CQG, XTrader, CTS, Vantage, etc... and you might even find NT7/MC/IRT... and all "new comers" tend to use NT7 because it is free for simm and they believe that trading in simm is an indication of how they will do in real life, but the fills are never realistic and the pressure of actual money never exists on simm. IMO, The most realistic simm I know off that we have access to as retail (for futures at least) is on XTrader... the second best, on CQG... and the most realistic from a inst desk side I forget the name now, but it was fun to use it... I had to take a "trading class" which has you behaving as the trader and you had to make markets on your issues and be flat at end of the day... you will get calls from buy/sell side and you had to always take the counter, offset in the market, and track what your book had and be as close to flat as possible at the end of the day or offset with futures... sometimes you will have profit because you stayed ahead of the desks calling you and you were quick to offset, others a loss... that was a fun simulator... now, my advice... pick the platform you will use based on what you will be trading and what features you are looking to benefit from by trading the products you will focus on... I use CQG because of the spreader, I could have used XTrader as well... but I like CQG a bit better because I got used to it... that is my main trading platform (even for "automated")... it also has backtesting which I quickly use to prototype ideas (not that I am that good at it) I own licenses for NT7 and Multicharts and MultiCharts.NET, as well as Amibroker, two of each... I use them sometimes for backtesting and for some automated trading that I want to do but havent done yet... Amibroker is best for basket trading and the type of trading I want to focus on long term... MC is best for the active trading, just not baskets... I dont completely trust their back testing, as I prefer to always forward test anything... anyhow, just my 2 cents given I had some time right now..
i've been looking seriously at Amibroker... seems like more centered around good code instead of flashy interface... plus most people that use it are happy.. its not expensive.. quickly i've found out.. you can't get around data... you need good data...... i start to accumulate data.. there doesn't seem to be a black market for historical tick data.. i wish there was.. seems like everyone pays up to tickdata then doesn't have the intellegence to resell to buddies.. idk
the tickdata db's are not cheap... but you can also use IQFeed with amibroker... depending on what your timeframe is, it might not make a difference... amibroker is indeed wicked fast....
thanks.. thats what i was looking for... "fast" is what i'm willing to pay for.. i think the guy that wrote that program "gets it" he isn't all tied up in the whole marketability of the platform.. its sort of self selling..
no problem with that.. its the data that is the killer.. 1300 minimum with tickdata.. for what i'm doing though it won't be necessary.. active tick goes back to 2010 .. "ActiveTick offers complete tick time series for all symbols starting from January 01, 2010 to present time." for fifty bucks http://www.activetick.com/activetick/contents/ActiveTickFeedDetails.aspx Maximum number of concurrently streaming symbols 500 http://www.activetick.com/activetick/contents/ActiveTickFeedPricing.aspx any thoughts???
you are not going to like my answer.... for anything intraday I dont backtest that far back... daily bars, sure.. which is why I use iqfeed for equities, I use daily bars with those... intraday opportunities are fledging, as such they are short lived when they appear... you basically have to quickly identify, prototype, backtest, deploy and keep your eye on it to notice when it fades away... that is why there are now tools for CEP that can see, backtest and implement immediately... but now you are talking $$$$ ... 30-40K a core... anyhow, just my 2 cents...
what is CEP? ... i really shouldn't even be thinking at this level.. my thoughts were to build some indicators and or signals to identify consolidations and breakouts for options trading... so if i'm in a butterfly and i get a breakout signal i can take profits... just stuff like that... Tick data won't help me there.. plus if your hedging options having a statistical idea where reversals happen makes gamma scalping more profitable.. basically in every respect i'm trying to create more hedging efficiency.. as well learn to program on some platform... the only way to learn programming more is to do more of it.. i have read plenty compared to how much actual experience.. .