@Siddhartha, Charting, Out of 3 you mentioned Ninja still has the best charting api imho. If you don't believe me, just open RightEdge and insert ParabolicSAR to see what I mean. Optimization: Without knowing more details it's hard to say, but in general - any optimization code should be a self-contained library with an optional gui that is consumer independent. If you want to know what I mean, check out TSG2: http://www.tsresearch.com/software/genetic_optimization/tsg2/ This is pure win32 cdecl dll lib that can be used from any software that can call c functions. I've used it in TS and from within VisualStudio - just to name a few. My point is that if you design your own optimization lib following the same api design principles as TSG2, then Ninja or any other .net compatible software will not be a problem. Hope this helps. Languages: It's not a matter of being hard or not - I just got sick and tired of being locked in a box and hoping for some language features. Not to mention the 'joy' with converting all the code written in language A into language B for the n-th time.
Hi Sidd Thanks for the reply. I am following this thread with interest. I have been using Metastock now for about 10 years but feel its being left behind now that Steve Achelis and the initial gang have gone elsewhere. I short listed 2 to have a further look at. They are Amibroker and Tradecision. Both look good. I am not much of a programmer. I like to trade EOD S&P500 and intraday S&P, so which of your lot do you think is more likely to suit me ?
@Siddhartha, Here's my take on the tools. OpenQuant: My experience with OQ is exact as yours - I think they are understaffed and consider OQ small potatoes. I too had trouble getting timely replies and specific answers, but they never forgot to offer me all the tools from them for $15K. Just thinking about the time when I seriously considered shelling out all that money gives me goose bumps. RightEdge: I agree that their support and features are excellent for v1.x, but it's a young product that needs a lot of work to catch up. NinjaTrader: This is my first choice - so far. Platform is very good for both automated and discretionary trading. it supports different bar compressions and multiple instruments within the same strategy. SuperDOM is one of the best (even better than X_Trader imho) and you can even semi-automate it with up to 3 strategies. Their support is also good and timely. Gui is a bit unpolished, but the package works and has a lot of features for sure. Version 7 will include .Net 3.5 support - which means you're getting multi-core parallelism, LINQ, etc for free. Did you have a chance to check NeoTicker and MetaTrader? P.S. For all other guys that are watching this thread: I'd say that Siddhartha and myself are looking for a trading platform that is: programmer-friendly, automation-friendly, and math-friendly. So, please don't limit your choices to this list alone if you have other criteria.
Humpy, To be completely honest, AmiBroker is, in my view, not for non-programmers. Perhaps I say that from a biased view point in that I'm always astonished that traders can achieve anything of real interest without a fair amount of programming. I have found the various 'wizards' for non programmers very limited. AmiBroker is a great piece of software for programmers... it can do pretty much anything you want if you can code. You can write your own dll's, has it's own developer API etc..etc... The other piece of software you mention I have no experience of. DC101, Good posts. To be honest I had a couple of specific problems with Ninja that pushed me away. Mostly related to optimization. I was finding their brute force optimization routines prohibitively slow for my use. I found the whole optimization side of Ninja underdeveloped. I looked at the genetic optimizer that was available on their forum... and it found it a little flaky. You will apppreciate how important it is to have complete faith in the results you are getting from a backtest. In short, I found Ninja's custom metrics and optimization underdeveloped. You are correct that I could have written my own GUI and developed dll's... but by that stage I was knee deep in AmiBroker. Which does have great access to a custom backtester and super fast optimization routines. Also, having done a lot of C#, I can say that another appealing aspect of AFL is that it's a very compact and efficient language - very quick for idea development. You can code a system in 10 lines of AFL which would take 3 times that in C#. But, you are exactly right, I think Ninja's DOM fucntionality is outright the best I've seen on the market. Superb.
@Siddhartha, Optimization: Of course, brute force optimization (BFO) is slow in any package. I guess AmiBroker has some kind of an optimizer built-in, which is not the case with most of the platforms. Your bar is way too high there. My only criteria for optimization is that the platform has BFO, for that allows me to plug in some high quality 3rd party optimizer. That's all I need to know for my platform selection. By the way, I've been using TSG2 since v1 and it's highly recommended. Optimization metrics: Would you mind expanding on which metrics are missing from Ninja? Also, aside from BFO being slow, anything else that you did not like there? Coding: Yeah, TS has the same charm - great charting and you can whip up an indicator or a strategy in no-time. That's how you get sucked in. The problem comes after some years when you need to do some advanced stuff which just happens to be not supported in the language, and there's nothing you can do about it. With non-proprietary language, like c#, the whole world is at your fingertips. So a little bit more coding is a small price to pay for freedom and, more importantly, preservation of the investment in code. So, what your top-3 list of platforms so far? Anybody else with top-3 lists?
@DC101, AmiBroker has the best brute force optimizer I've seen on the market. It is, and I'm not kidding, 150 times quicker than OpenQuants... I can't quantify how much quicker it is than Ninja's... but it's much much quicker. Excellent plotting of 3D optimization results for identification of maxima & minima etc. AmiBroker also has a specific optimization plug in interface. Specifics - the usual genetic optimizer, particle swarm optimization etc..etc.. But the point I'm making really is that the 'out of box' solution that AmiBRoker uses is far superior to Ninja. Also, AmiBroker has a multicore optimization plug-in... it allows you to brute force optimize over as many cores as you have... I have 8 so that's a big bonus & HUGE time saving. For me, I'm more than happy to program in 2 languages side by side. Not a problem. If one allows me to very quicky write, backtest and optimize ideas but then I have to port over C# to autotrade... that's not a problem for me. I'm def. not knocking Ninja... it's a nice piece of software. 3 or 4 times the cost of AmiBroker... but that wasn't the main issue for me. For my type of trading I could do anything I wanted & more with AmiBroker. Top three... well, I think it depends on how & what you want to trade/level of programming skills etc. But in no particular order... AmiBroker, Ninja & RightEdge. For the record, I think RightEdge, in time, is going to be pretty special.
@Siddhartha, Thanks for providing more details - I did not see your points as knocking Ninja or anything like that - I just wanted to get your input in case I've missed something during my evaluation. It's great that Amibroker has such great features that are working out for you. Cheers.
@dc101, You've been impressed with TSG2 you say...? Can you continue to use it with Ninja...? It looks like it only for use with TradeStation... Is that correct...?
@Siddhartha TSG2 guys are very good in math but their marketing dept obviosly sucks. As I mentioned, it is a pure win32 c dll and has no dependecies tied to TS - you call it from TS EL and not the other way around. It has gui too for results grids and graphs. I'll definitely use it with Ninja or any other c# trading platform in the future. I've used it with TS extensively and VisualStudio.Net (I did some test runs to try several difficult optimization problems known in math community), but you can also use it in old VB, Excel, RightEdge, OpenQuant, MetaTrader, or any other app that can, with little or no programming, call classic win32 c dlls. They have a free version, which they call demo? (marketing again), with some limitations - so you can practice before purchase. Link: http://www.tsresearch.com/software/genetic_optimization/tsg2/