I had all the versions of Tradestation that existed since 1994 and switched to Ninjatrader in 2014. I prefer Ninjatrader without any doubt. Easy language is "easy" but has a lot of limitations. C## has much more possibilities. I find NT7 a lot better than TS. Support from Ninjatrader is excellent too, fast reactions if you have questions, a lot of videos to watch the potential of NT.
No idea where you got this idea about Ninja. I have been using it for over 10 years. First as charting from Ninja 5, then for manual trading and now all my algos run on it. IB live data is indeed unreliable, not sure where the blame is. I use kinetick for data feed (100 percent rock solid) and IB as broker. I would vouch for Ninja any day.
I am just stating my experience with regards to live trading with Ninja Trader; it was horrible to say the least. But anyway, glad your experience is better. The problem with IB's live data is still I believe Ninja Trader's problem. I suspect it is just slow in fetching data that it is so slow that they lose or drop data packets when receiving the price data from IB. When I was using Ninja Trader, the huge price spikes tends to always happen during the 5:00 PM rollover time for forex when IB shuts down its server for its 15-minute "maintenance". When price feed resumes after this cut-off time, there would be a huge price spike. It's because Ninja Trader was just slow, either because its server is slow or its price-fetching script is just slow in executing to fetch the last data packet that's stamped at 4:59:59 PM or 5:00:00 PM from IB's server before IB shuts down. And then when IB's server restarts, the price data would be stamped at 5:01:00 PM creating an unmatched "disconnection" in the price feed and when the price data is not complete, huge spike happens to try to take the place of the missing data packet. You just need ONE tick to be missing and the price spike would happen and the whole price curve and all the indicators that are based on the price are all screwed up. Starting with Ninja Trader 7, you have the ability to repair the spikes if you want and the way to do that is to examine the price tick by tick and repair it. I have done that on quite a few occasions as at one point, I was getting huge price spikes almost every single day. And every single time when I was repairing the price data, it was ALWAYS ALWAYS because one of the ticks was missing or sometimes a whole bar would be missing. I had to go to other price source and find the missing price tick(s) and once I put in the missing price data, the spike instantly disappeared. If you confront Ninja Trader with it, they will never admit to anything. They will always blame IB for everything but deep down they KNOW it's their problem. And they don't bother to fix it because that way they can push you to use 3rd-party data for them to get a cut. The truth of the matter is, you do NOT need 3rd-party data, IB's data works just fine. It's Ninja Trader that just screws it up on purpose for its users. I use Sierra Charts with IB data as well and I have NEVER ever NEVER had problems with price spikes, NEVER throughout the whole time I was using Sierra Charts. Why? It was because Sierra Charts' fetching mechanism works faster and more efficiently to get the data from IB. If it was really IB's data that contained price spikes, then why there was never any price spikes when I was getting it from Sierra Charts? All Ninja Trader is is just a data seller. It uses its platform as a front with its graphics, large database of indicators, programming ability in C# to entice you to do all the programming and customizing and then once it's hooked you onto setting up its platform then it just feeds you bad data on purpose so to force you to spend extra to get 3rd-party data because you've got everything else set up. I have no problem with Ninja Trader being just a data seller but I wish they just be honest about it. Instead of masquerading themselves as a platform provider with programming ability which they are not (they are nowhere NEAR MultiCharts) , they should just come out and advertise themselves out to be a data seller like eSignal, RealTick so users would know what they are and how to work with right from the start so they wouldn't have to go through all the hoops of setting up everything for nothing.
I am curious...Which markets were you trading with Ninja? Stocks futures or options? And did you have any custom indicators? Their own native indicators? Ug, I have many questions about this for you...
I was trading forex and I had custom indicators. I didn't use any of their stock indicators and customized all of them on my own when using them.
Did you ever notice that little option in their indicator template about calculating bar on close, true or false? I think Ninja's default was toggled to false, which means that the software had to calculate your indicators on each incoming tick. This would be very problematic during a data surge, like during a CL or NG report release.