I have been considering saving up to purchase a lifetime subscription to Ninjatrader. However I have been unable to estimate how the ~$1000 price tag was arrived at. I understand that Ninjatrader offers many things which other free or lower priced platforms do not all offer, such as automated strategies, user-friendly coding abilities, and historical replay and simulated trading.
A good comparison is with Photoshop, which has been developed by teams of hundreds of developers for over twenty five years, currently there are 41 active developers who worked on Photoshop CS6. Adobe Photoshop CS6 costs $699 for a lifetime, non-upgradable, copy. Reduced rates apply to students. Therefore most who pay for Photoshop at the full price are doing that for their business needs and have a near guarantee that by purchasing Photoshop they will increase their profitability. Unlike for graphic designers, when it comes to trading products, there is no reduced rate for the student nor is there necessarily a high probability of making profits after purchasing an expensive product. Therefore one has to either lease Ninjatrader and try to use it a lot within a month or two to see if it is a profitable product before buying it or they must make a gamble. I am not sure that this gamble is justified, although the popularity of Ninjatrader on this forum and with Mack of Price Action Trading is a pro in favor of making that gamble.
I checked Ninjatrader's copyright info, several of the copyrights are from individuals not directly affiliated with Ninjatrader LLC, such as quickfix (2001-2005), openSmtp.net - C# SMTP library Copyright (C) 2001-2004 Ian Stallings, and openssl, 1998-2004. I am unable to determine how many developers are/were working on Ninjatrader itself.
My opinion, as of now, is that the ~$1000 price is not justified until more info can be gathered on the development process, developers, and the costs involved, as well as how stable an organization Ninjatrader is, since free lifetime updates are included in the ~1000 dollar purchase.
Can you help answer these questions from other members on futures io?
I don't want to speak for Ninjatrader and have no affiliation, but I am not sure what your point is. Ninja trader is a company and their platform is like many others out there. It is very popular because of their DOM and chart trader capability plus it is so easy and flexible to program in C+ any strategy you want. They have many thousands of users and growing every day. They do not nickel and dime you for new features or future updates.
As for pricing, it is so easy. It is free for life with all updates to use in demo with full functionality. It costs $1000 for a live license if you decide to start trading with real money. That simple. That is their business plan. They give it to you free to try all you want until you are serious enough to use it as a business tool then you pay $1000.
So, go ahead download it and use it as long as you want in demo for free. When you decide to go live, talk to them, they have some kinds of pay plans so you do not have to pay all the $1000 in advance.
Cheers!
The following user says Thank You to aligator for this post:
Hmmm...curious why all that is so important. If NT does all that you need it to do then the pricetag isn't so bad, imo. If you think otherwise then for you it isn't worth it. So, if that is what you feel why even bring it up. Just don't see anything in your post saying what your goal is in making your comments.
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Which trading platform Hyundai you are driving that is priced less than a $1000 Mercedes?
For your information, Jigsaw is a good DOM without the ATM, charting, and programming capabilities of NinjaTrader. But that is all and you will have to pay $50 a month to use it live after you have paid $399. There is a wealth of information under Vendors section in this forum that you can benefit from.
@KosherTrader, most of your threads are about everything being too expensive in the world of trading:
The first was about futures.io (formerly BMT) elite membership
Then Jigsaw
Then Ninjatrader
It's reasonable to want to shop around for the best deal with any purchase, but if these sorts of startup costs are really that much of an issue then you are not in a place financially to begin trading. It is what it is, take it or leave it.
futures.io (formerly BMT) has massive amounts of useful information, webinars and downloads in the free section. If you like what you see and want more, get an elite membership.
Jigsaw has a two week money back guarentee. Try it for two weeks and if you dont like it, get your money back.
Ninjatrader is 100% free to use in SIM with LIVE market data. You can do absolutely everything Ninjatrader has to offer for free until such time as you want to trade live. Again,....try it and see if you want to buy it.
Trading is hard and you're going to be up against the best in the world with unlimited funds behind them. You need to be well capitalized to stand any chance of surviving the learning curve. If saving a few hundred dollars on initial startup costs for software is an issue,..then you are no where near well capitalized enough to survive the learning curve that is yet to come.
Sorry to be blunt, but your threads all revolve around the same topic of trading startup costs being too expensive. It is what it is. Try the free trials. Take it or leave it. How they choose to price their products is a business decision and has nothing to do with you ultimately becoming a successful trader.
Diversification is the only free lunch
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You can simply pay the 50$ per month charge for a lease, and now all of a sudden NT7 becomes comparable to all the other famous platforms in use on this forum.
You don't really need to pay for a life-time license ($995) although this is the logical next step once you try NT7 and feel confident and happy with its capabilities.
In fact, you'd better also try Sierrachart for a while too, it is 45$ per month if I am not mistaken, and then you chose the one that feels better to you.
I personally went with NT7 because of its life-time license, I hate paying infinitely recurring monthly fees, but that's just me. In reality, I was comfortable with all the platforms that I tried, and I did try many they all suited my trading style and requirements...
Successful people will do what unsuccessful people won't or can't do!
The following user says Thank You to Fadi for this post:
From what I've gotten from using both TOS and Ninjatrader, Thinkorswim is like a free Lexus compared to Ninjatrader's expensive Mercedes with outdated visual styling and less intuitive interface.
So, bottom line...if you're that satisfied with TOS, why even bother with NT at all ?
"If you don't design your own life plan, chances are you'll fall into someone else's plan. And guess what they have planned for you? Not much." - Jim Rohn
I was first drawn to NT in early 2009 because I could code my strategies in C# (I'm a professional .NET developer). I tried the free Ninjatrader for a while, SIM traded and continued expressing my ideas about the market with custom strategies and indicators. I eventually wanted to go live but didn't want to commit to the lifetime license yet so I leased it for 3 months. After that I decided to buy a lifetime license in September 2009. That was 4 years ago and I haven't paid anymore money to Ninjatrader, except for some periods where I played around with the real-time Kinetick service (correlating ES to TRIN and TICK, backtest strategies with intraday stock ETF price data, etc).
I also use thinkorswim for my IRA where I trade stocks, ETFs and options. I've been a ToS user since 2007. There's a lot of things I can do in Ninja that I can't do in ToS, and vice versa. They are both part of my tool belt. Also, futures commissions on ToS are over 50% higher than Mirus, unless you can get TD Ameritrade to give you lower "active trader" rates, but even those rates are still higher, so there's that. Also, 100% of my futures trading is automated (on Ninja). I couldn't do that on ToS, or if I could I don't know how.
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As part of my research for the upcoming "Where to start as a trader (Part II: Trading Platforms) (" webinar, I want to solicit input from members about the platforms they use.
If you could give me some information I would appreciate …
you said it more politically correct than I could have.....I'm wondering if kosher trader is actually jewish or someone playing the forum using a stereotype name to pick on them......I'm 100% Dutch and we "hollanders" are cheap too, but not to the point we would start multiple threads on saving money....
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Man you are unbelievable, TOS under load adds the SER to say nothing of the frequency of its unreliable updates. Beginning to think you just like the posting sport. I do not want to be harsh (I can do that to myself easily enough) but if you really are serious about trading you need to take a big step back in perception and a big step up in attitude to save yourself a fortune.
Travel Well
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TOS is excellent for trading stocks with its intuitive design and handling. It would be superb for trading futures in the basic Al Brooks style as well if TD Ameritrade had reasonable commissions.
Ninjatrader is cool certainly but its price is extremely high, no question. I have contacted Raymond Deux via support@ninjatrader.com to see if he or his reps can come on here to discuss the pricing issues, which were brought up by many folks in Bigmike's thread on Ninjatrader he linked to.
I had an idea last night, with all of the coders who frequent this site the community could design an open-source, free, donation-supported trading platform to surpass any of the current platforms. I believe that is possible with the talent we have here.
I do not understand this claim. How can the purchase of any software offer a near guarantee of increasing profitability. This is not possible. Rather, it is impossible.
It would be open-source, so anyone could modify it to improve it, therefore the quality would improve, eventually leading to better trade execution. Linux is proof that programmers take pride in working and improving on an open-source product and money is not the incentive.
Depends on who is buying Photoshop. If it's a professional or qualified student there is a high probability that Photoshop will lead to revenue from job offers which require CS6 proficiency. The opposite is quite possibly true in trading, someone buying Ninjatrader could actually have a higher probability of losing money in trading than making money, and around $65 a month or $1300 (or higher depending on your income tax rate) would have to be made to get to breakeven just from Ninjatrader expenses.
@KosherTrader
If you think an open source project has merit, then why don't you take on the project as the project manager and get it started. See what kind of response you get from the futures.io (formerly BMT) community.
No, my point was that the probabilities of success or failure are skewed much more towards failure, i.e. financial losses, for a student or professional who purchases Ninjatrader than for someone who purchases CS6 Photoshop with the intent of using it for business purposes.
With the probabilities of success so low and cost so high compared to other professional products, an open-source platform seems like the logical solution.
I must be confused. NinjaTrader is free. You can trade with it for free (as in no cost whatsoever), what is the issue? If you need to use Ninjas ATM strategies then yes you would need to pay the monthly free or buy the licence but if you want to trade for free (manually placing orders, stops, targets) and you seem like a chap who is all about low cost i don't understand how you can argue against free.
Do you understand you can actually trade with Ninja for free?
"Money is better than poverty, if only for financial reasons." - Woody Allen
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Free would be with the direct edition, which has limited functionality: "Direct Edition License allows you to trade live without purchasing a Live Edition License. This functionality to trade live without purchase means that certain features, such as Chart Trader, ATM strategies, NinjaScript, etc are not included as part of the license."
Has something changed recently? If you go to NinjaTrader stock, futures and forex charting software and online trading platform. Download registration. and fill out the form you will get a free copy of the same version of NT that I have a life time license for. You will be emailed a sim license key and be able to install and use it for as long as you want. Only thing is you will need a datafeed which comes from a broker. If your broker supports NT then use their datafeed. Just to be clear, this version has all the features you mention.
If my memory serves me right - there was/is a platform called "MultiCharts" - I think it was developed in Russia and you can have some sort of an "open source" solution that you can customize and call it your product.
Hope this helps.
S.
The following user says Thank You to ziggy123 for this post:
In most of the cases with NT7 your OCO orders are stored locally (on your PC) and not on server side, so you may suffer from this in case of disconnection etc.. if you are using both SL and TP simultaneously.
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Yeah, I guess so. Didn't seem very interested in trying to improve himself in becoming a better trader or helping others become better, just wanted to complain a lot.
I think Ninja trader should just get rid of the free version all together if they don't allow ocos because it's dangerous to not trade with out a stop-loss. The majority of people who don't want to pay are probably newbies who might think it's okay not to use a stop since it isn't provided either. Anyways, all reliable trading software cost money because money is necessary to upkeep the software and pay for tech support. You just have to pick the best of the evils. Sierra chart's package 3 is probably a cheaper choice for what Koshertrader is trying to do with Al's method. NT is better suited for automated trading if I'm not mistaken.
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I think he was focusing on the wrong part of his trading. A VPS from @Sam28 and monthly Ninja license will set you back $120 a month. Much less than a monthly X_Trader license. Much, much less than what desk fees cost back in the day.
I remember talking about fees to a hedge fund manager years ago, and this is the gist of it. 'Do I care about the fees? Yes, but I care about the net more. Fees only matter in the absence of value' He is not generating an edge ( value ) so fees matter to him. Once you have proven your edge to yourself, I don't think anyone would complain about $120 a month. Until then, stick to SIM or head over to Micro FX where the platform (MT4) is free.
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It's like a professional dentist that wants free office space, free advertising, and free staff -- to save money, instead of spending on those items that are crucial to his success.
Just to be clear, with the direct edition (free) you can place stop orders along with profit targets manually. At the end of the trade, stop out or profit filled, you manually cancel the remaining order.
"Money is better than poverty, if only for financial reasons." - Woody Allen
When I was trading with amp a couple years ago the free version allowed oco. (I can't remember if it came with amp or if it was just part of the free version.) Later, I remember a while back after NT7 came out I hooked my account up to NT direct edition and couldn't use the ATM portion so I called the broker and he said that I'd have to manually exit out of the trade where ever price was at that moment. Are you saying that after I enter a trade I can then place a stop loss at a certain price and leave it there so when price comes to it I won't have to do anything but wait for price to hit the stop loss and then cancel my limit?
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Not quite sure I am communicating correctly. You can place all your orders before entering the market. Set your stop, set your profit target and of course set a limit order to enter as you wish.
"Money is better than poverty, if only for financial reasons." - Woody Allen
yeah but there's a slim chance if you walk away from the computer or don't close out the limit or stop after the other has been filled you could get stuck in an unprotected trade if the market reverses. That's the nightmare. If you're scalping the market could fill your limit or stop and suddenly reverse to fill the other order before you can cancel it if there is high volatility. I know it's rare, but I'm sure it could happen especially if you're distracted by something outside of trading. If you're a more of a long term trader lets say an hourly trader odds are you probably aren't by your computer the whole time to cancel the remaining limit or stop. Even a vps can't save you with this. But hey, I don't care about the price, I just think if they're going to give the free version then ocos should be the last thing they hold back from the customers. I can't really see any other reason that they do this other then to give customers incentive to lease or buy the product. It's very confusing why they'd limit such a crucial feature to trading and not something less dangerous to your capital.
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^This to me is factored into the true cost of ninja trader direct edition even though it is free. Honestly there is a whole laundry list of things that could be simply improved with Ninja trader, especially Ninja trader replay, but bickering about it gets us nowhere. Despite all of Ninja trader's flaws it still has an impressive and easy to use interface which will always be regarded in my mind as the platform I loved to start with trading futures in the beginning. It holds a certain level of nostalgia to me. Even though the replay feature frustrates me with certain flaws I haven't been able to find a better one. So, please if anyone knows of a superior replay software let me know as I'm constantly looking for new strategies to use in combination with already existing ones. Thank you.
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they all suited my trading style and requirements...
