I've played with NT and CT(cooltrade). CT seems to be the only one of the bunch that is truly fully automated out of the box. With NT (and OQ from what I hear) you'll have to write your own stuff somehow to get them to manage strategies between shutdowns. CT (however it does it internally) knows how to synchronize strategies and positions even between shutdowns. On the other hand CT only provides a relatively simple wizard for creating strategies, the whole app is quite slow (visual basic?), and the backtesting is not reliable so developing strategies can be quite slow (develop one, test it against live data for weeks, repeat). You don't have much flexibility. If you want to write a system using the provided indicators with no backtesting CT might be ok but it doesn't seem robust enough for anyone that wants to do 'hardcore' automated trading.
Have you tried the other "NT". I refer to NeoTicker the sponsor of this thread. Quite powerful in automated trades.
NinjaTrader can run as many strategies as you want (or your computer can handle). The main downside there is that each strategy runs on one instrument, but you can have as many strategies as you want, it's just annoying to have to manually start 100 strategies (if you want to run against 100 stocks). OQ supposedly can run multiple strategies but I don't know how to get that running. It seems like one workspace = one strategy and you can only have one workspace at a time but this is probably a limitation of my understanding (like others have said the documentation for OQ is poor). OQ crashes on me too (especially when re-running a strategy against multiple instruments). As far as i can tell, neither Ninja nor OQ handle starting/stopping/errors gracefully. You'll have to program synchronizing your strategy with your current portfolio yourself. I'm just looking for a stop gap until I can write my own and so far I prefer Ninja. Amibroker doesn't handle automation well (from what I hear), OQ has some annoying quirks and limited support, CoolTrade is not flexible enough for a 'power' user, Ninja does not support advanced features that you might want in the future (according to sky123987). I'm going to look in NeoTicker, TradersStudio, and TradingBlox next.
I have been running multiple strategies on multipe instruments with openquant ever since the new version came out. Everything has been fine
Truthfully if you demand that the program have ALL those features really the only way to do it is to create your own ATS from scratch. I have looked at them all, but decided to build my own in straight C++ It's one hell of a process, but you really can do ANYTHING, everything you mention you can do. Now you talk about limited support, if you think OpenQuant is bad geez try coding in the brokers API. I'm with Genesis, there is absolutely NO support. If you want support they say hire a programmer. Figuring out OpenQuant is 10 times easier. Probably the reason why I decided to was because OQ at the time did not have the mult strategies version. Had OQ had that at the time I would have probably gone with that one.
NinjaTrader ray tells me that you can run one strategy against multiple instruments instead of running multiple strategies against one instrument each(which you can do too). My mistake (from limited experience with NT). Sky, I see that you can add multiple strats to one workspace in OQ. That makes sense.
I just started looking at NT and have basically no C++ experience. But I thought you would be able to do simple stuff through their ATM templates, like set 4 targets and multiple trailing stops. But, you can only set 3 Targets in the ATM, if you want to configure 4 Targets you have to use the Ninja Strategy builder, and build something like this: Enter using 4 entry orders with 6 contracts each and provide each with a unique signal name - Call SetProfitTarget() three times referencing three of the signal names, do the same for SetStopLoss() or SetTrailingStop() depending on how you want to manage the stop for these three exits - Call SetTrailingStop for the final 6 referencing the last signal name - When running your strategy, set the "Entry handling" parameter to "Unique entries" Still trying to figure it out!
If you're interested in trading a strategy against the entire market (instead of just a basket of instruments) I'd suggest Trade-Ideas and their automated trading robots. http://www.trade-ideas.com/ It lets you trade a "event based" strategies - that is, trade a particular event across the entire market. The beef I have with Ninjatrader is that you have to set up strategies symbol by symbol.