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Neotickers chart flexibility is cool, no doubt. Thats about it though, and I'm pretty sure I would go off the deep end if I had to look at its ca-1998 GUI all day every day. Same thing goes for tradestation.
SmartQuant has potential but it has many bugs also and lots of areas that need more development and unlike NT they have very little in the way of support or user community.
MetaTrader is pretty good and I would consider using it but no ECN brokers is a dealbreaker for me.
anyone else tried other platforms that are potentially worthwhile?
Can you help answer these questions from other members on NexusFi?
Maybe i can clarify, I've never had strategy analyzer open while running a live strategy. NT is not stable while running a live strat bc of their DB I wouldn't add more fuel to the fire by making it eat up 1.5g of ram at the same time
w/ running a virtual term it wouldn't really be needed bc i dont backtest during mkt hours. Id rather it be able to work natively on *nix but beggars cant be choosers, but i would like for nt to be stable. The other major problem w/ the software that you noted is that it will invariably crash and can/will do so with open positions. im not trying to sound all elitist but i run a business and that business is trading. i simply dont have time for stuff that doest work anywhere near the way it was intended.
the DB problem i "solved" my deleted the db every day and starting fresh. That still didn't always work for some reason.
Ahh ok, sometimes I get stuck in my Forex mindset and forget that other markets close =)
FWIW I run multiple strategies (usually have 3 going, 2 of which are MTF and somewhat cpu/memory intensive) 24x5 with no stability problems anymore. As I mentioned in the other post the key for me was to make one NT instance completely dedicated to running strategies, while using others in virtual machines for development and backtesting.
I think I understand now why you have so many problems just running strategies though, I noticed in the other thread about IB you mentioned you are trading stocks and therefore loading stocks data into the db, in addition to forex, etc..
I would guess that the large amount of data from all the various stocks you chart is what overloads the db. Most NT users it seems only trade FX or futures so do not run into that problem. It seems like stock trading was kind of thrown into NT as an afterthought anyways, I would probably use a different platform too for trading stocks.
Anyhow, hope you have better luck with TS.. let us know how it goes =)
I haven't had problems with crashing or strategy analyzer, but I'm only working with a handful of futures instruments so maybe that's why.
Also, while I haven't deployed a live strategy yet, my intention is to have it run on a dual Xeon dedicated rack-mount Windows server, which I already have, and that's all the server does.
Yeah, I can't believe it's using Access, should have at least gone to SQL Desktop Edition or something. It'd be nice if you could wire it up to your own SQL Server via a connection string for more umph as I've got a dedicate SQL Server running already at my co-lo.
your xeon rig will be way overkill for it. it has memory issues up to ying yang, cpu performance is fine... it limits itself to 25% utilization, no joke
And re TS being backwards, that very well could be, i don't know since i have yet to try it. However, dumping something that is unstable to the point of it being useless for what I need, is never a backward move imo.
I have been playing with Tradestation as well as I moved my Fidelity IRA over to TS but the software has been a pain to get started with I'm thinking of switching back to thinkorswim which I've used before and is nice for options trading but the commissions are a bit high. TS does have some nice stock screening tools and the data feeds seems pretty quick. I think I just have to get over the learning curve.
and please fyi im not trying to be a troll and come down on the app everyone in here uses. ive been a huge nt fan, developed a ton of proprietary stuff for it and have praised it up and down on their site and to others i know. its just not working out what what i need. i feel bad for the bar chart guys too, they just sent me an email checking in and i have to cancel them now too, and their service is terrific, chicago guys too
Haha, great point about the interfaces. Metastock is pretty bad in that regard too.
Have you looked into Wealth-lab? It uses C# as well, so for those with a lot of custom NT stuff, it seems like it would be the easiest to migrate to. I haven't looked into it much myself, but would imagine it has its own set of drawbacks and a less vibrant user base.
I quite like MetaTrader as well(at this point the only thing I could see myself switching to). MB Trading (ECN) supports it but its not fully rolled out yet and although they also support NT, I believe you can only use one platform per account.
MT5 beta should be coming out around the same time as the first NT7 beta so it will be interesting to see how they compare. The big kicker with MT5 is that all custom indicators need to be reprogrammed for the new language. They could be shooting themselves in the foot here as the wealth of indicators for MT4 is unparalleled and that's the main thing that draws me to it. Apparently MQL5 is about 20x faster, but I don't see why they just don't switch to a standard language like C# or C++.
If its just as easy to convert MT4 to MT5 as it is to convert MT4 to C#, this could be an opportunity to siphon some of that talent over to NT.
While I don't think NT7 is going to be anything revolutionary, I think I'll be happy enough. Enough new features to keep me interested, most of the most annoying issues addressed, and it should be at least 2-3 times faster on my hardware. Works for me.
