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My strategy is a scalping strategy using stop market orders for order entry. These orders get placed one tick above or below the bar that's giving me entry signal. I use the chart trader and market structure to enter trades and manage the trades with the little paddles on the chart. ATM places stop and profit levels. I do not use a DOM. Only price action.
Very rarely did this ever cause me any noticeable or tangible problems. On very rare occasions, I would get rejected because the market shot off too fast and went past by order. But this did not effect my strategy and its simply the cost of my strategy.
Now I have moved onto using a trade copier from replikanto and multiple funded prop firm accounts, and the problems start. Very clearly whats happening is that the trade copier takes a split second longer to populate and send the orders across all 5 accounts rather than just one account and no trade copier at all. What ends up happening is that either I get rejections for all accounts, or worse, 1 or 2 accounts will get filled, the others rejected on entry, but the ATM still places my stoploss and take profit levels. So in the accounts that get rejected, if I enter a long position, I get rejected, but my profit target is still there so price hits the profit target and puts me in a short position in a fast moving bullish market.
Ive played with this alot and I do not have this problem if there is extra time (split seconds) before price moves into my stop market order. The copier works fine, best I can tell, it just seems that its a time thing, and the milliseconds that I lose going through a trade copier just screws everything up.
So the reason for this post is to find out if I can speed up these orders so that they are as fast as using no trade copier. Or to try and find out if its even possible to speed this up. Ideally I would like to do whatever I can to make all my entries lightning fast, but I dont know if thats even possible with Ninjatrader.
I use 1 workspace with 1 ES chart that has 2 tabs, a daily chart and a 2000 tick chart. and another MES chart with 2 tabs, a daily and a 1450 tick chart. No DOMS at all. Indicators on all these are very simple. Just an EMA and tick counter, but alot of drawing tools and high priority economic news on the chart. I have very low demand on ninjatrader.
I use Rithmic data and I have 1gigabit fiber connection that tests around 950Mbps connected with CAT 8 cabling.
My computer is unfortunately a 2019 Mac running windows 10 with Bootcamp. The hard drive is partitioned giving the windows side 500GB and its solid state. Windows side is bare with only required applications and mail and chrome. Processor benchmarks at only 8,500 but im not sure if its testing properly due to how its setup. My graphics card is lacking and not enough to power my external monitors: intel iris plus graphics 655
Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-8569U CPU @ 2.80GHz 2.80 GHz
16.0 GB (15.8 GB usable)
Will using the superDOM over the chart trader make any improvement? Will a new PC help? Are there settings within ninjatrader that I can utilize? I just need those few milliseconds back I lost from the trade copier at a minimum, but ideally I would like to make it as fast as possible. I dont mind buying a new PC if I get confirmation that it will give me a tangible increase in order entry speed, but I am a relatively new trader whos just now starting to make consistent profit. If a faster PC solves the issue, then it easily pay for itself, but if it doesn't, then thats $3k - $4k wasted.
I am also emailing Replikanto with the same questions, but I really like to hear what you guys might think about this, and if you use a copier and what issues you have, or if you have no issues at all and it works flawlessly.
I've created a trade copier and I have clients who had problems with Replikanto, and not with the one I've made.
Still, this is not an advertisement, and the problems faced by my clients may be different.
The problem might be your latency to the exchange, a 1 gb/s connection is great but it doesn't matters much, what matters is your latency to the market gateways. From Thailand you may have a 250 ms latency to the market gateways, which is super high.
Your computer computing power is not the problem.
A trade copier requires very little resources, and using a DOM or chart or a strategy to send an order won't make a difference.
Ive thought about the latency problem, but people trade from all over with NinjaTrader dont they? I mean, my problem goes away when I stop using the copier. Wouldn't the problem still exist if latency was the issue? I also know some people who trade the same strategy that have the same issue and their physical location is in the states.
Do you think your copier would have any effect? Id like to take a look if you dont mind.
Do you know of anything one could do to decrease latency? Im open to to any ideas.
Edit: Rithmic has different gateways, one is in Singapore witch is basically across the street from me right now and has strong infrastructure. I could try that, but do you know of any way to test this other than trying it with live data?
Even if the market gateways are in Singapore, the CME gateways still in Chicago, and from Singap to Chicago it will take some time. Also it depends on when your copier replicate, if it's when the order is initialized (so before being sent to the gateway), or if it's when the order is acknowledge by the gateway, by the exchange, ...
from my understanding you should get filled with a stop market in any case - probably larger slippage. but it's a market order, not a stop limit, which could be jumped over in fast markets.
do you have checked if there is any message in the Rithmic client for your replicated accounts?
Before buying a new computer why dont you consider to rent/use for 1 month a cloud server, robust enough to run your system and near enough to the exchange to reduce latency..
That was a great post and thank you for bring up these various issues! I would like to follow up with you to see where you currently stand with all of that? And see if you were able to mitigate this problem? Please write back, I would love to hear from you.
Considering the seriousness of trading, the obvious choice to me was to buy a new PC. The Mac I was using was grossly underpowered and was clearly a problem with my setup. I ended up investing in a MSI laptop at an eye watering price. I went as high a spec I could.
12th Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i9-12900HX
RTX 3080 Ti
32GB/1TB
Windows 11
I was immediately apparent just how underpowered my Mac was. Just something as simple as the bars printing on the chart through my 38" external monitor was vastly improved. It was such an improvement that it took me a few days to adjust to it. I can see alot more detail and volume in the bars when they are printing which due to my strategy is very important. I wouldn't be surprised if there was some kind of lag from what was happening in ninjatrader to what I was seeing on my charts through the external monitor. The updated graphics card alone has made a huge difference.
Shortly after I started this thread, I changed and stopped using the copier. I have not tried the copier again just yet because I dont have anything to copy anymore.
I have very high confidence that if I was to use the copier it would work alot better because I can see already how fast orders get into the system just by watching the orders tab and playing with the system. I can not confirm that this solved my issue yet but the stark difference already noted is incredible.
The Mac was an obvious bottleneck and the new MSI PC was a good decision, but I can not just yet expand my trading until I recover my expenses so it'll be a while before I can actually confirm if this solved my issue.
First thing you should do is look at the NinjaTrader log file because it has timestamps for the trade copier orders and the order states. Are your multiple funded prop firm accounts under the same Rithmic login? Or is it multiple different Rithmic logins/different prop firms?
I would think that Replikanto copies nearly instantly, maybe just a few milliseconds to submit a new order to all the follower accounts, but maybe the delay is with Rithmic to change the order state to accepted?
If the log files show it's taking a long time for Replikanto to submit the initial copy order, then perhaps a new PC will solve the problem, since you are technically running with a Mac using parallels. I don't think it should be a Replikanto problem because I have multiple livesim performance accounts with Apex all under the same login, and the orders copy in <10ms. However I'm not using Mac Parallels and instead running my strategies on the high performance chicago vps from ninjamobiletrader.com
The other reason I doubt it's a replikanto problem is because I also use replikanto in network mode to copy to my other prop firm accounts with bulenox, and even copying trades to other vps (within the same local network) is also <10ms. But examining your log files for timestamps is the first thing you should.
