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I cannot confirm horror stories. There is a number of reasons that I stay with Interactive Brokers.
(a) my money is comparatively safe, guaranteed by the British state
(b) the front end is extremely reliable, never had any issues (compare no crash ever with TWS during the last years but several hundred crashes with NinjaTrader during the same period, very few down times)
(c) I can connect to a Swiss server, they have direct lines to the US
(d) I do not need high speed tick data, I am not pressing the button every few seconds.
There are some bad things to say about Interactive Brokers. The data quality is not very good, but you get what you pay for. Anyhow a broker is not a data provider, and you need to pay for additional data if you want quality. The service quality is not good either, if you have some secondary issues it may take time.
But I cannot blame IB for the problems with NinjaTrader. Could you explain me, why - all of a sudden - most problems were solved with NT7? Because NT developpers reworked the interface to comply with the specs of the API of TWS, something they should have done years ago.
But overall I feel safer with Interactive Brokers than I would with Mirus Futures. Who would guarantee my funds, if I send them to Mirus? They do not have European subsidiaries. No state protection.
You seem to mainly trade the Forex market. If the Forex was my market i would try to find a Broker where i could use Metatrader. The platform is basic but it rocks and it's easy to program. Takes very few PC resources too.
Trading index and currency futures. I would never consider MetaTrader for a few reasons. One of them is that it allows Forex Brokers to evaluate the trades of their retail customers and trade against them. Second MetaTrader is not impressive at all. Third, FOREX is a non-regulated market and my money is not safe with a FOREX retail account. For the time being, I am fine, and if I open a second brokerage account, I know where to look.
You nailed alot of the things that IB does very well, and they deserve alot of credit for being a solid platform, all around the world. I rely on IB as my main broker (funds are protected) and sparingly use other brokers outside of Canada. Historical data was always a pain but the chart app crashing is definitely a Ninja problem. I really made my life easier by getting a secondary data feed with iqfeed - decent historical coverage. And they will waive CME fees (like many others) if you have an account with an approved broker (IB isn't but Mirus is for me), so its simply the base cost of $60/month for all CME related exchanges. Something to consider.
Personally I hope you decide on MultiCharts, because you write such nice code I'm sure that the EasyLanguage community could definitely benefit. We already discussed how my Pivots were off, and I know that is one of the first things you would do
I think I will opt for MultiCharts. There are two reasons.
-> The principal investment is learning the language and the code. Easy Language has been the most important resource for over a decade, so I am interested to learn it. It is a bit backwardish, but extremely easy, so with some heavy knowledge of C#, it is a task that is quickly attainable.
-> NT 7.0 has quite a number of improvements compared to NT 6.5., it can be used as an execution front-end and for charting. But I would not dare to rely on it for backtesting or automated execution, as I know that there is a whole army of little devils working beyond the surface. I think that MultiCharts is more reliable for both these tasks.
The only temptation would be CQG/Mathlab. Could reuse my code and knowledge directly.
Not in a hurry, currently no problems with NT7. Also need a DOM. So if I use MultiCharts for charting, I would need something like X-Trader as well, to replace NT.
