I know that the answer to that depends on what kind of trading you perform, so: What I do couldn´t be more basic (I think). I just trade usually with market orders to get in and out (but always leave a stop-loss for "emergencies") and I use volume candlestick bars to watch the session, purely technical, no indicators, not even a moving average. My trades have different durations depending on what is happening, it can eventually be hours, but most commonly a few minutes to 30 minutes. I´m questioning this with the AMP customer service, but I think that maybe I can get different ideas to compare to what they´ll tell me. Thanks!
Hard to answer, NeoT. Your trading is very raw. Also, you are a difficult to read since you dislike Sierra and like Ninja. They are all built to suit your needs. Demo them all.
I actually don't dislike Sierra. I think Sierra is great... But it's all full of adjustments with those endless pages of explainations of every possible little details you have to adjust, especially when you´re plotting tick or volume charts, if you forget to do one of this configurations, your chart won´t be accurate. So I finally set the charts correctly and it´s fine. I have read all of those pages by now(but they´re continuingly updating them). LOL. That´s ok, lazyness isn't something that combines with a trader. But when I tested ninja a couple of days ago, all I did was open the platform and everything I wanted was there ready to use. And, the main reason why I considered Ninja was cost... I can buy it and with Sierra there's no way to do this, so you always have to pay for the platform and the datafeed, whereas with Ninja, only de data feed. But, everything that looks too good to be true, usually is... LOL. So, I decided to see what you guys thought of this...
I am actually an NT owner myself, but value I see value in the product for different reasons other than the charting and trading interface.
Like I said, your methods are very raw. When evaluating the applications, you have to think about your workflow. That's unique to you. The nice thing is that you are just evaluating the application's "Run-Time" performance. Other traders have to worry about pre-trade checks, analytics, post-trade reporting, compliance. etc etc.
I know... I figured that some elements that might have been criticized by others would be no problem to me... But, some things that could be problems to me as well could come up too... So I'd "filter" what people said and include that in my decision... The final decision will definetly come from my testing, but what I tried to do here could alert me to certain points to be aware of while testing...
Here is a nuance you may not notice. Imagine setting up a watchlist/quoteboard of several dozen futures contracts. Every month the current futures contract expires and a new month becomes the current month. Most platforms will handle the roll forward and keep your quoteboards up to date. With NinjaTrader, you have to retrieve the current month, edit your active list and plug it into the appropriate quoteboard. Insanity!