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Gotta be honest, I would probably have used/use NT8 replay more if this were fixed.
I tend to use it occasionally, and I do find it useful - but if you want to go back and forth, the hassle of having to go through this loop for every iteration is too much of a waste of time and I stopped bothering.
Thanks Bob for spearheading this. I was told by a very respected FIO member that NT resources are scant which is why I didn't complain, but you made me realize that speaking up is worth it on this one.
I think it's obvious that their resources are small, and they do have a lot on their plate. But a clear thing like this should be somewhere on their radar, and if they see that there is a user interest then it may get attended to ahead of something less clearly beneficial. Also, this certainly seems like a smaller fix than some would be (or so it seems to me, but of course I don't really know.) The thing is, if it isn't fixed then Replay is nearly useless for many of the things you would naturally use it for.... anything where you want to skip around at all. Move around even once and you get really tired of it.
I test drove NT8 for the first time last year and in no time ditched it into the ash pile of crappy engineered software as soon as I realized that NT's software dev team either didn't know what they were doing or management was incompetent. For the price they are charging, all these issues are totally unacceptable.
Now, a quick disclaimer: I am an ex-software engineer and by far my biggest pet peeve is to see piss-poor UI design and crappy software architecture. Even more so in 2018.
Think about this for a second: Why in the financial industry do we still have to deal with software that looks like it's been conceived 15 years ago and behaves like some rookie CS freshman coded it in his bedroom??? That's right TT, am looking at you.
To put it in perspective: AI software (ML aka machine learning, NN aka neural nets) is being developed successfully all over the place--this type of software is orders of magnitude more difficult to get right than a stupid front-end user facing UI streaming data to be displayed on a 2D chart.
So let me take this opportunity to help the users on here who may not have a computer science background understand one thing about software.
The fact that subpar software like NT8 is still being produced and sold way above its real market value goes to show how many traders still fear rocking the boat, challenging the status quo, and rising up in righteous outrage. They have become so cozy with entrenched habits of thinking and viewing the world that they continuously give a pass to outfits responsible for shoddy software engineering practices and poor system architecture choices.
Please, don't be that guy. Realize this is not 1995 anymore--this is 2018 and software has no right to be this bad anymore.
Traders that do not know what it takes to create good software need to realize it is not rocket science to build a decent UI/UX (User Interface/User Experience). Just look at tradingview.com--although lacking in many essential pro functionality, it works like a charm and is one of the most user-friendly app out there... and it's all coded in Javascript running inside a browser, for God's sake! Crappy Javascript instead of C# and they still manage to give you a better user experience than NT does.
So guys, there is no excuse for month after month of crappy software releases. Don't be locked into a software system just because you can't or are unwilling to kick a habit--don't be like those Windows users who yearned for better but couldn't bring themselves to switch to Mac OSX or Linux. Especially as traders, you should always be willing to learn something new, push the envelope, stay curious and look for something better because there is always room for improvement as the sorry history of NT painfully shows.
OK, rant over. I hope you will, as a community, vote with your hard earned dollars.
PS: and speaking of design, here's one for Big Mike: Why is the Log Out button at the bottom of the site's first page? And on subsequent pages, it is nowhere to be seen. Please put it at the top of all pages next to where the user name appears.
So if NT8 is so awful, what software alternatives would you recommend instead? And writing your own ML/AI-based python/R trading platform is not an acceptable comparison. I'm talking about something for people without comp. sci. coding skills can buy off-the-shelf.
I'd recommend AlgoTrader (it uses tradingview for charts, plus all the pro goodies for algo development), Jigsaw daytradr, AlgoTerminal (formerly IQBroker), AgenaTrader, Bookmap (which is similar to Jigsaw Auction Vista, just mentioning it to give more choice) in that order.
AgenaTrader and AlgoTerminal also let you write scripts in C#.
AlgoTerminal is 'endorsed' by Collective2 (https://trade.collective2.com/). Well, perhaps 'endorsed' is not the right word, but C2 recommends it to their clients.
Then there always is the Javascript webapp UI from Tradovate. Not bad for beginners, but.... At least, it doesn't have the issues NT has. And wherever there's a browser, you can trade without having to install anything or paying close to $1,000 per install just for a lifetime NT license.
Just saw this post from Paul at NT support, on the NT8 support site, regarding the Replay feature request I had made:
So it is a movement.
If you didn't see it, the request is to eliminate an odd behavior in the NT8 Replay, where it does these two things:
1. When you initially set the GoTo or slider control to the starting time you wanted to replay, NT8 chugs along, painfully plotting each bar, one by one, from midnight until the specified time is reached.
2. If you are already at some particular time and you just want to skip ahead, NT goes BACK to the beginning of the day (midnight) and plods along, bar by bar, until it catches up to where it was, and then plods on until it reaches the time you entered.
Yeah, they really do it that way now.
The request is to not do that, and just refresh the screen at the time you wanted (like it did in NT7).
If you use Replay, or might someday, or if you just like things to make sense, you can go to this link on the support site and add a post asking to have your vote recorded for this change: https://forum.ninjatrader.com/showthread.php?p=540546
They use the votes for a feature request to help set the priority, so voting will help get their attention to the user interest in changing this behavior.
I am sort of beating on the drum on this, maybe a little much, but I like things to make sense, too.
