Never opened any accounts with the Ninjatrader brokerage, so cannot comment on its brokerage but the Ninjatrader software is horrible, extremely unreliable and undependable for real-time trading. It's great to use for charting, learning how to program in C#, developing indicators/strategies and backtesting but NEVER use it for real-time trading. IB is a horrible broker but at least its platform executes the trades, correctly 99.99999995% of the time.
NinjaTrader is unintuitive to say the least. That being said, Vmware makes it possible to run just about anything on a Mac, NT included. Why are you considering NT? What features are you interested in?
I just wanted to check out something different. I don't like the idea of hacking out a way to make something work on a mac though. Too many moving parts for me. I'd rather just find something that works like it's supposed to. I don't require much for my trading style, just a buy and sell button. I was just exploring for curiosity.
Got it, makes sense. I would seriously check out Vmware, it is top-notch software, nearly flawless. I guarantee the weak link in your setup would be NT, not Vmware. That being said, if you just want a buy/sell button, what is wrong with the native IB platform?
NinjaTrader 7 and 8 are FREE to use IF you don't trade through their interface. For what it does, it's easily the best free charting software you can use. In NinjaTrader 7, if you add the "indicators" called MousePanToolbar and ToolbarShortcut, you'll find that the interactiveness with the charts improves immensely. IB has a well-documented, free to use API so if you can code, then you can write a middle-man piece of software that NT talks to and IB talks to and now you have a 100% free trading solution...best of both worlds. Even if I didn't have the middle piece, I could use NT for their excellent charting and trade directly off of IB's price ladder (yeah, it's intentionally crippled so it doesn't violate the TT patent, so what, still works well enough for fast trading)