If you decide to use OpenQuant, I'd suggest you REALLY look into the fills you're getting. In testing a very simple strategy using end of day data on openquant (purely for the purpose of testing the fills) I noticed buying outside of the low-high range (and specifically told it to buy on the close of the day). While this may have been a glitch that was my fault, I'd still suggest with OpenQuant, and any other software you purchase, to carefully, painstakingly check the results before placing too much faith into it, but I'm sure you already know that.
@Siddhartha I'm playing with NinjaTrader as well - would you mind expanding on your claim that it's for "vanilla trader"?
DC101, what I mean by Vanilla is that the architecture of Ninja is not very open... hence it's hard to plug in quite complex stuff like a bunch of different optimization routines, math specific plugins to do more funky and complex analysis... etc. In a nutshell, programs like OpenQuant, AmiBroker and RightEdge are a more open architecture.
May I suggest having a quick look at the open forums discussing these products. It is quite easy to see which are are more active and dynamic than the others, which directly reflects the product. I don't think you ( Sidd ) mentioned if prices are influencing your choice ? Personally being "time rich" I favour organic growth i.e. start with minimum bids etc and work up with accumulating profits. If it's no good your account will soon remind you
Humpy, I think price is always a factor for sure. That said, I'm not that sensitive. If I felt a product could give me an edge that others couldn't and it cost $1000 then I would have no problem paying it. However, I've been researching this a long time now... and obviously I've made some choices. From what I've seen there is absolutely no need to spend more than $500 tops. Right now I'm primarily using AmiBroker and am quite active on their forums. AmiBroker is def. as powerful a product as I have seen - but for my specific uses. I trade a few of the E-mini contracts only. So I have quite specific needs. I have also found that the automated trading interface that AmiBroker has (for interactive brokers only) is also very much good enough for someone trading like I am.
Thanks Siddhartha - I see what you're saying. On the other hand, regardless of the tool and its support, I'd still write all what you've mentioned in VisualStudio as dlls, and reference them back in the trading software. Ninja allows me to instantiate any type of object coded in my custom .net dlls, pass local dataseries to them for calculations, etc, etc. Any specific case, you stumbled upon, that you couldn't solve with custom dlls? P.S. As a pro developer, my general suggestion to you would be to stay away from any tools with proprietary languages. I've learned that lesson with TS. Great environment, but ... Having said that, I'm personally considering only tolls that use c# - Ninja being one of them.
Hey Dc101, I agree. I do programme quite a lot of C# and I think it's really exciting what's happening in this space right now with Ninja, Open Quant and RightEdge. I'm watching with real interest. However, Ninja as of yet don't have an open architecture API for developers basically. I was looking to access a number of low level functions of the system to integrate my own optimization routines into the system and couldn't. Also I wanted to access some of the low level graphing fucntions to plot some specific types of data series that Ninja didn't support out of the box. I couldn't. For me Rightedge looks like they have an intention of being a much more open architecture with a proper API for developers... not just an API to carry out trading functions that they have thought of. There will be things traders want to do that these guys haven't thought of. As for learning a proprietary language... well, once you've learnt about 4 programming languages, how difficult is it to put another one on the list...? No so hard. And in this case, the reason I have learnt AFL (array formula language for AmiBroker) is that put quite simply, it optimizes about 150 times faster than other systems on the market. For me, that's the very clear payoff. Hope that helps.