Well, ZenFire IS Rithmic. That said, it is an unfiltered high quality stream. Under normal conditions all streams should be identical
We do work directly with front end software firms. The front end software that has been released using R | API directly is: Ninja Trader, Focus Trader Pro and MultiCharts. e-Signal has released a version of their software that uses the Zen-Fire api, but underneath it is R | API. Others are in the works but we do not make puiblic their identity until they have released their products.
Check out this brief video The speed, the granularity, are almost identical if not identical I can't see any difference The great thing is that T4 doesn't lag in fast maket condition I think T4 has a more robust architecture http://rapidshare.de/files/48257878/Ninja_Zen_VS_CtsT4.avi.html
But again, this is a comparison of NInja vs. T4 And we all are aware that Ninja architecture and programming is - hm - let me say "performance challenged" I can gladly inform you that I was running all day an applicatoin getting a nearly complete feed from the CME - lacking bid/ask, but all else (including best bid and ask). Ok, I accept Bid/ask inforamtion accounts for the majority of the feed. Still, this is complete CME - all futures, options, spreads published by the exchange. Anyone not having an idea what is being talked about here - we talk of about 400.000 ticker symbols total. Coming from Rithmic's development environment. This is a pure "get the data, dump it" applicatoin to do performanc testing on their API This is NOT using Ninja. No lag, CPU nearly neglegible. RIght now I am getting in about 60kb of data per second, CPU Usage is around 5% of a single core (AMD 2378 used, Hyper-V, the VM has basically free reign and access to 4gb, 4 cores, OS is 2008 R2 64 bit) Now, there SEEMS to be an API issue somewhere with the full feed (overloading a core - this is being investigated at the moment) when using AMD machines (no intel here, sadly, but I am informed it works fine on Intel), but just to remind you - this is currently a feed of 400.000 symbols. I am a little doubtfull NInja would survive that more time than it takes to pop up a crash window
The Rithmic website doesn't seem to provide much information on R Trader. How similar is it to NT? Does it provide all of the same features? Is it a practical and efficient solution for retail traders, or are we stuck with the problems NT is plagued with?
It depends what you do. RTrader is NOT an automation platform, os that part is totally out. It has a lot less limited functionality - no charts, no ATM (only normal brackets, no trailing stops etc.), obviously no indicators and I personally found the interface a lot less intuitive for managing orders.... on a limited number of symbols. It gets better with many symbols traded as one does not have to "register" them first. OTOH... it has support for a lot more symbols (spreads, virtual spreads managed by rithmic), support for some more order options (time based orders) but still does not expose the complete API (missing notable from order management: iceberg options, cross symbol triggers). OTOH, for example.... it has... OPTIONS I fear you are stuck For now