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I have been using NT7 for almost a year. Have experienced tons and tons of crashes, mostly within backtesting. You guys are right about its limitations...takes a while to figure them out and get around them. However, I still gets bugs in the results. Most common is negative bars in the trade history...wtf? It has also predicted trades on occasion (which I wish were true ). When I asked for help i got the same thing, "could not duplicate, will look into it..blah blah blah" This throws me off as I am always questioning if the trades it documented are 100% accurate. The other thing is the .NET memory limitation garbage.
One of the programs that I have been looking at is Open Quant / Quant Developer. It has very similar specs as NT and is supposed to be used by many hedge funds... does anyone have any experience/thoughts on it?
I still see recent talk of people about to give up on Ninja. I thought I'd put my experiences up here too.
Firstly, the bad stuff. Ninja is not very professional. Some of the development has been quite shoddy, and badly tested. We all know about beta 7 testing and how long that lasted. I also believe the regression tests during nt7 beta were nowhere near comprehensive enough. That's practically provable. The support, while always friendly and quick, can be somewhat variable, with too high a percentage of posts not read and understood properly.
Now onto the better stuff. I think those of us who have stuck with it for quite a while know it's got great potential, esp for automated traders like me. The vast majority of my development and testing has been under NT7, so I can't comment much about NT6.5. What I would say though is that I've now been running plenty of live intensive strategies 24 hours per day for over a month. With zero crashes, and one overfill bug which they said they'd fix. CPU and memory usage is very low.
One consequence of doing so much testing, backtesting, replay and development is that I've developed quite a feel for hand holding my code from backtest to sim to live, and the differences therein, which are substantial. I don't believe you can properly do otherwise. This means I have all sorts of pieces of code, and statistical analysis that help me make those transitions and interpret the results.
One example would be - during multi instrument backtest I write all my trades to a file which is then processed by a perl script on my Linux VM. This gives me a decent cumulative profit curve over all strategies, along with correct versions of stuff that Ninja does rather unprofessionally in my opinion - like the drawdown being an average of the drawdowns for each strat, and the trades/day figure including weekends.
I realise not everyone will have the time or resources to do this much, and you know you shouldn't have to because Ninja should just do it so their customers don't have to. If I hadn't done this stuff, I would be too uncomfortable to trade live, and that reflects quite badly on Ninja. It's what I mean when I say that Ninja is not quite up to proper professional automated trading, unless you're prepared to do some of the coding yourself that should already be there.
So, in summary, I'm sticking with it, because it's working for me, but I fully understand why it doesn't work for everyone, and I hope Ninja's focus will be on doing what they already do more properly.
I've been training myself to be a better trader for quite some time, and have made significant advances on many levels. Major appreciation is felt for just about everyone involved in forums like these, especially those who start them up (Mike), and do such a great job of moderating.
However, the more I progress, and especially as I begin to turn that corner into profitability (yes, it IS happening), I find myself increasingly impatient with the likes of the NT programming team. I am so tired of spending valuable time sorting out SO many bugs, oversights and just plain poor programming and usability.
This ONGOING lack of professionalism is an insult to those of us who constantly strive to better ourselves, and the lives of those who depend on us. What a slap in the face.
Having said that, I am sticking with 6.5 for now, as I have already invested the time needed to sort out most of it's shortcomings. Fortunately, my dependence on NT has steadily decreased over the last year, and this was no mistake.
I will be aggressively pursuing a permanent replacement.
btw, I run Thinkorswim and FXCM Trading Station along side of NT, both of which are fully opened and connected long before NT has even opened it's charts, never mind getting connected to ZF.
And my pc is no slouch, just trust me on this.
And I work for no other related interests, I'm just so d**n sick of being insulted like this, and today's little experience with NT7 was the straw that broke the camels back. It is time to move on.
Thanks for hearing me out, and I promise that I will not post on this subject ever again, here or anywhere else.
Thanks again to Mike, and all of the others who are so generous with their technical assistance, and other contributions.
A very small example, and only a small part of the big picture: In trying to set up a chart in 7, it is now necessary to change settings in multiple dialogs, where this was not the case before. Also, when changing settings seemingly for one part of the chart, others are also affected unintentionally. In some cases, there appears to be a dead end in trying to achieve simple chart setups, the likes of which have never been an issue in any other platform I have used.
I concentrate mainly on price action and volume, with essentially no dependence on indicators. I don't ask much of my platforms. This should not be so difficult to accommodate.
I am no longer going to use valuable screen time to chase down and compensate for these ridiculous idiosyncrasies.
There are obviously those who know of which I speak, and those who will find out. This has been made abundantly clear in numerous posts here and in other forums. Google it. It is for this reason, and the ones mentioned in my previous post, that I will not take the time to track, itemize and list all of the problems I have experienced with NT, especially with 7.
Suffice it to say that I am a fairly adept user (not a programmer, nor should I have to be) of trading platforms, and pc OS's and software in general. I "run a tight ship" here, and only ONE piece of software has been consistently disruptive over the years, and that's NT, plain and simple.
If you are not having problems, then run with that.
I posted here to vent my frustrations, and to establish closure for myself. The previous post was supposed to be the last, so this is going to have to be it. I hope I have explained myself adequately.
). When I asked for help i got the same thing, "could not duplicate, will look into it..blah blah blah" This throws me off as I am always questioning if the trades it documented are 100% accurate. The other thing is the .NET memory limitation garbage.
