Sierra Chart: very robust, customisable and feature rich except for options. Quantower: Jack of all trades, master of none, but nice, nonetheless. Jigsaw Daytradr: Best DOM all around. TT: Best if you're trading size and want to automate strategies, best feed/execution around.
sierra charts: stay away from it. Non-standard and non-intuitive user interface. Worst customer service you will find in the entire industry and will regularly tell their customers to literally get fkd and then later edit their posts to be more politically correct. Huge Qanon believer and support for the global COVID conspiracy. Frequently threatens people with dumping all support for CQG as a way to try and pressure their customers to use their in house Denali feed. jigsaw: Bug city. Non-stop bugs with this software. The typical response from the useless customer support is very reminiscent of MS Windows turn it off and turn it on again approach. They will often give the excuse that your workspace is corrupted or your database is corrupted - OK, but why is it corrupted and what investigation / debugging do you have to find the reasons. No answer from them about that, they want you to go through the process of deleting said assets. The problem will recur frequently. Strategy manager falls apart if you are scaling in/out of trades. Settings are not remember sometimes upon successive starts of the application. Just super buggy. TradingView: Too simplistic and too tedious to do study and research IMHO, over priced for their top tier package for what you get. If I could afford it I'd go with TT or CQG integrated client. But since I can't afford it, I will be trying motivewave during rollover at the end of August.
DOM from Rithmic Pro sucks. In volatile markets the market price disappears from your screen as DOM cannot follow the market fast enough. So you have to scroll manually up and down and try to find where the market exactly is. Very bad manual too as well as bad customer support. I wanted to block short cut keys, but never found it in the manual and customer suppert never helped me we that. Newest annual you can find is years old.
Maybe its because CQG would actually work properly. All these reasonably priced programs are filled with bugs. Just started a trial of MotiveWave, complete garbage. Can't even get bid/ask volume assigned correctly. CQG live account data feed. Every single T&S record is 100% opposite to what it is supposed to be. The MotiveWave support guy tries to tell me this is likely specific to Hang Seng - NO it is not, I am comparing it to jigsaw of which I am watching live in the DOM and Jigsaw is doing it right. Plus does the support rep really think a company like CQG would get this wrong? Decades as a data specialist... My STRONG recommendation is to run from MotiveWave.
then you can try multicharts/amp combo. never see a good chart trading in cqg or tt demo. hsi is on my list but my timezone is off.
You have it correct, unlike anyone else I've used almost all of these, and have used all of the ones that work including TT and CQG which you can say are more institutional grade, but CQG is a bit unique how it works and TT is Futures based but they work with per second datasets well, along with Tradestation and eSignal platforms. You can actually get Metatrader to work with per second data on MT4 and MT5 but for order execution and initial analysis, it doesn't work well with detailed analysis where you need the institutional platforms to confirm trade setups to increase the probability. The main problem we had was point 2 (Speedy with lots of small charts on the screen / ability to link them) to be able to draw charts and move to another machine with the same drawings loaded, have 250,000 data points across all the charts updated in realtime, the ability to change all chart instruments in one click, and auto rotate. You may find one in a platform but not all of them, so we had to build it ourselves, for point 3 use Parallels if you have a good mac, or you can just use a windows VPS and remote desktop in to it, there are advantages including being able to monitor across devices, screen dimensions stay fixed, and the most important to be able to pinch zoom, you truly have no idea how much it changes your decision process making you more profitable.
MidKnight, You seem to have tried various software with mixed results. Curious - did you ever try NinjaTrader? I've torn my hair out multiple times over NT and often find that it seems like a platform developed exclusively by software engineers, not traders. There's tons of unresolved user requests over the years while they continue "developing" stuff that nobody really asked for. Also, for many I imagine it might be a dealbreaker that they're not broker-neutral. For futures, you basically are left with either Interactive Brokers or their own brokerage. That said, after I solved all my various needs through some custom scripts NinjaTrader does run very smoothly on my end and it pretty much meets all my needs. If new needs arises it's usually just a small project on UpWork or similar if I need a custom script. I'm also very happy with their brokerage and with a lifetime license their rates are fairly competitive. I was considering making a switch a while back, but in my research I basically realized that no software is perfect and the other ones I considered also had issues. The same thing with brokers I believe.