Not sure I agree with that as you can do the same in OQ for $30/month. It really has to be a hard feature to feature comparison. Nice to hear that another product "might" be competitive though. I actually have my doubts about NT being competitive. But... Is there a link to the NT feature list?
I was wrong, apparently, as NinjaTrader is actually free for Advanced Charting, Market Analytics, System Development and Trade Simulation. The monthly charge is only if someone will trades live. I should be able to do a feature comparison sometime soon, once I start on a EasyLanguage -> OpenQuant backend for my translator. I only translate to NinjaScript right now but it's the same C#. What are your doubts about NinjaTrader? I used X_Trader for a while and then tried NT. I didn't like the DOM in NT but it was perfectly robust otherwise. There's also no ZenFire feed/execution adapter for OQ that I know of.
NT was a scalpers front end the last time I looked -- which was a few years back. That's a very different animal from an ATS that does sophisticated backtesting and analysis. Just taking a quick look right now version 5 is not at all the same animal. Like I said I have my doubts regarding a head to head feature comparison.
NinjaTrader 5 is the wrong version to look at as C# can only be used for indicators in that version. NT 6 is the version to look at. I don't have time to do a feature-for-feature comparison, specially since I don't use OQ. Hopefully, the NinjaTrader folks are reading this thread and will chime in. I have my doubts about OQ, personally. It's been almost 3 years since I last dealt with SmartQuant/QuantStudio. About a year ago I tried to look for people successfully using their products in production and I could not find any. Will the real Slim Shady please stand up? Yes, I know that there are institutions using their products, people bought source code, etc. Still, it should not be hard to find traders putting money on the line with a good product. There are plenty of people doing so with NinjaTrader.
lol... I remember chatting with you about QD when it first came out. I know a few people that use QD successfully for their trading. I don't think it's that unusual. I do agree that retail customer service could be improved over there but I don't see that as a definitive comment on the merits of the product. The big problem is the conflict between institutional and retail right now. Having said that NT 5 is not in the same league at all. I have downloaded NT 6 but I don't see how you go from a front end with basic charting and an "API" to receive trade signals to the kind of capability that an OQ or a WL or a RE has. Hopefully, I'll get around to unpacking the app a bit later on and have a chance to review it and report back myself. -Sam
Play it again Sam! I didn't say anything about customer service, you did. As for conflict, there can't be any. The tasty morsels have been sold off and OQ cannot have the features of its bigger sibling. I have a hunch that OQ will be just a pale shade of its former glory and neither the Open in the name nor the new monthly price will make up for that. Care to dispute that? I'll see if I can compare when I have time to spare. Let me know if there's anything particular you have doubts about. It takes time to build a good product but I'm not sure what is "that kind of capability" that you are so fond of. I'll take up the challenge and dig up the matching features in NinjaTrader6 if there are any features in particular that you are missing.
Frankly, customer service doesn't matter to me if the product is decent -- I use IB after all and am quite happy with 0 customer service. So, I don't hold that against them at all. You might be right about OQ and former glory. There's now way to know right now as it is still evolving rapidly. What I would say is QuantDeveloper was bought by a larger firm and that speaks to the merits of it as far as I am concerned. One thing is clear about the situation over there. They can add complex institutional level components just about instantly with a nod from Quanthouse. I would recommend OQ to anyone that wanted a single strategy ATS/backtesting software. It just happens to be the case that I run multiple strategies all the time and so OQ is not suitable for me. Whether or not NT will be I'll have to see. So to answer your question about my needs: I would like a robust, real-time, multi-strategy, multi-portfolio, ATS with meta-strategy money management features. It should be able to back test the same on intraday data at a reasonable clip and allow me to customize the metrics I want for reporting and analysis. It should also allow me to export my results to a statistical package for further analysis. And of course, it should capture and store historical tick level data on all symbols for analysis and testing. So if it looks like the new version of NT will do that I'm interested. -Sam
Hi Sam, I'm using the full SmartQuant suite: QuantDeveloper, DataCenter, and CATS. There's no getting around the fact that QD is expensive. If any of the ~$1k products out there could handle my needs, then I happily would have stuck with one of them. Another option was to have a programmer build something from scratch for me. I wrestled with this for quite some time before deciding to buy something off-the-shelf that could handle my needs in a robust way. There is literally nothing I can't do (that I'd want to, that is) with QD. polr
I always hear it's expensive. Can somebody put a ballpark number out for the full SmartQuant Suite? 5k? 10k? 15k? 50k? And what is the monthly cost? Thank you.
SmartQuant sold the institutional rights to the QuantDeveloper suite of products to QuantHouse. I believe QuantHouse charges around $5k per month (though you would need to confirm this, as I believe there may be different price points). I was able to get the suite directly from SmartQuant because I had been dealing with the company for some time before the sale to QuantHouse. I paid a fair chunk of change (immaterial at this point, as it's no longer available on such terms), but it ended up saving me many tens of thousands of dollars in development costs and time. I guess the goal for QuantHouse is to compete against the likes of Apama (which I believe goes for around $10k/month) and similar products. polr