I have had a couple of Ninjascript bots built, without much luck. They seem to freeze up a lot. I've found a freelancer I believe (and hope) to be better than the previous two. He is building my 3rd (and final, unless it works) NT8 script for automated trading. How many of you have use NT8 for automated trading, and what has your overall experience with it been?
It works well for me and others I have written scripts for. Hopefully, the people you are hiring have experience building systems with NT.
Maybe you could reach out to @RedDuke. If I'm not mistaken, he runs automated strategies on NT8 in a professional capacity and have expressed great satisfaction with NT8. I don't use NT8 for automated strategies, but I have some experience hiring programmers. Generally, it's better to pay up for someone that's good instead of hiring multiple cheap programmers in a row which does not lead to satisfaction and ends up being more expensive in total anyway. Usually, you get what you pay for - with a few exceptions. Preferrably hire someone with great reviews and which clearly shows in advance through communication that he understands what you want to accomplish.
Heard many bad things from many people about automated live trading on Ninjatrader over the years. It is only good for backtesting purposes nearly everyone is confirming. If you have the code in C# you can also try MultiCharts as it has multiple connections to different brokers and datafeed options.
We are using NT8 (my experience goes back all the way to NT5, though algo trading was first done in NT7). We are fully automated and have no issues with NT8. we only trade commodities. I know that ninja also supports stocks and options. IB can be used to stocks for sure. NT8 is rock solid multi core, but you need to know what you doing. And it is not just strategies for trading. For example, we constantly ping broker to check if our positions and resting orders match with what we should have. also we developed tools to monitor market data and availability of cloud servers. it takes a lot is work to have robust fully automated systems. good luck.