There are plenty of off-the-shelf products aimed at the institutional market that might be worth consideration. For example, ORC, RTS Tango and Apama to name a few. Depends on your budget and needs but it might be worth going for something better than openquant.
Siddhartha, May I ask if you've come to any conclusion, and if so, what made the scale tip in one way or another? I'm new to ATS (currently trading EOD), and I just can't seem to wrap my head around what are the main differentiators between OpenQuant, RightEdge and Ninja Trader... What I want to be able to do is to trade several systems, on several different markets, using different time resolutions (using IB). It's important to me that my system is able to dynamically calculate position sizes for new trades, in relation to total account value and all other open positions. It would have been neat to do some proper backtesting (on portfolio level) in the same package, but my feeling is I might end up doing that somewhere else, perhaps in TradersStudio together with my EOD- trading... I really want to get the full picture of the complete portfolio to improve on the money management aspect of my trading. I'm new to C# (all my systems are in EasyLanguage) but eager to learn. I prefer a flexible package to a simple one. I have installed trial versions of all three, but I feel I'm still too much of a newbie to determine which of the packages that would suite my needs in the best way... therefore hoping to learn more this way, make a choice and then commit fully to learn all ins and outs of that package. Once there I don't want to find out I should have gone in a different direction Obviously, if someone else wants to chip in I'm all ears! Thanks
Hi Venustus, Well, where is got to (briefly, because it's late here in London) is the following, 1. I was impressed with NinjaTrader. Well supported. Nice product. But more for the vanilla trader... that's not to say you can't do some funky things with it... it's just that the infastructure of the program if not fully open to customers/developers to tinker with. NinjaTrader people like to release functionality slowly at a pace they are comfortable with, which allows them to fully support the product. But it's nice. The best ladder DOM functionality I've seen... nice if you intend to do some discretionary trading too. Lots of visibility. 2. OpenQuant... well, I have to say I didn't dig too deeply. The reason? I felt that not only was the product poorly supported (I should qualify that by saying the support is certainly not gold standard, maybe not even silver... but bronze). Also I has a sense from hanging out on there forums and reading a considerable number of threads, that OQ was really a line into the more profitable business of QuantSmart... and as such, OQ was something of a 'loss leader'. I for one am not comfortable building mission critcal apps around something not supported to gold standard I guess is the bottom line. All that said, I've read threads of people who are actively using it and happy. 3. RightEdge is a product in very rapid development. My contact with the guys at Right Edge left me in no doubt they are a very competent bunch of guys who are hungry to develop their product quickly and tailored to the needs of traders... but most of all they offer a gold standard support option... and it's well priced. I've been very impressed with Right Edge. I can't comment on whether it can do everything you want... but if it can't, my bet is it will soon. 4. AmiBroker... following some other posters, I've been wrestling with AmiBroker for the past 6 weeks. It's a little wierd in places, a little unique and esoteric... but generally it's a fabulous piece of software, backed by one of the best programmers in the industry from wat I've seen. I think I'd have to agree with other posters who use AmiBroker ad their idea generation and backtesting platform (it's VERY quick)... and then they port those ideas over to either RightEdge, Ninja or OpenQuant. I think that's a good system. But AmiBroker can probably do what you want from a backtesting angle... However, forget about AmiBroker as an automated trading platform... it's not built for that. But in terms of raw speed of backtest and optimization it leaves all the others for dead. And it's pretty cheap. Hope that helps. Sidd
Sidd, Many thanks for taking your time, lots of useful info! Will compare Amibroker to TradersStudio, and dig deeper into RE. I do find it a little strange that there is no more talk about RE here in the forums. I$land, I will take a look at WL when v5 becomes available, thanks! Happy trading!
Nice post, Siddhartha. But, it seems that venustus, is trading EOD: So, venustus, do consider TradersStudio, as it has many features, strong forward & back testing, multi-tabs, charts, data import & export, migration tool for the TradeStation EasyLanguage & many more. It is a tool for End of Trading traders. Its technical & customer support is good. It has manuals & help and it is cheap too. Please have a look here, to know more of it: http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=108534
Thanks TraderSystem, I am very interested in TradersStudio actually, and will compare it to Amibroker in more detail. I know TS are due to release a real-time version soon as well. It is true I trade EOD today, and that will remain the main part of my trading, but I want to compliment that trading with some ATS to (hopefully) smoothen out my equity curve and lessen risks by adding some uncorrelated strategies in other markets. That's why I asked Sidd for his experiences so far. A question though; it should be possible to backtest EOD strategies together with e.g. systems run on 5-min bars as ONE portfolio in TraderStudio right?? Cheers!
Yes it does, you can backtest down to 1 minute bars using tradersstudio and combine them with end of day strategies.