Did anyone ever compare NinjaTrader and OpenQuant for realtime automatic trading? I am using NinjaTrader and when multiple charts are opened and multiple strategies are running, it seems it obviously consumes more cpu resource than some lightweight charting softwares. I have little experience with OpenQuant. I am wondering whether OpenQuant would consumes much less CPU resource than NT so that more strategies on more instruments can be running on the same computer without freezing it. Also is it possible to write a pure ATS without charts in these two platforms?
I never found occasion to compare CPU usage but can say that OpenQuant is more of a "backtesting and live trading first, charts are add-ons to assist in that" type of an environment. It's not documented well, were I not a professional programmer I'd stay clear of Openquant but were I confident in my C# skills I'd probably use it exclusively.
This may be the wrong place to ask this, however... Have you used NT's ATM - if so, can you give me a critique. Just wondering
By the way - I am a programmer. The only time multiple charts should degrade performance of your system is when they are using different inbound data streams (different symbols). If you are experiencing degradation otherwise, then determine if there is a way to reduce the refresh rate of your charts - the bit blt operation that causes them to update can be expensive.
How do you mean without charts? With OpenQuant you can write a system and it will print out the entries / exits into the chart, but the chart dont has to be open when the system runs. Also you can see the scanner where you see a list of your signals in realtime without any chart. I dont know how it works with NT. I have checked many programs like OpenQuant in the past and I think OpenQuant is very good, at least it can do all I need.
I played with the NT system tester and I never could prove to my satisfaction that it worked... the OQ one has simulated annealing which is great for testing a system with a lot of variables and getting it done in a reasonable amount of time. The alternative is to do successive approximations of each variable and "home in" on a solution but it's far nicer to just kick off the sim anneal and go do something else...