Welcome to NexusFi: the best trading community on the planet, with over 150,000 members Sign Up Now for Free
Genuine reviews from real traders, not fake reviews from stealth vendors
Quality education from leading professional traders
We are a friendly, helpful, and positive community
We do not tolerate rude behavior, trolling, or vendors advertising in posts
We are here to help, just let us know what you need
You'll need to register in order to view the content of the threads and start contributing to our community. It's free for basic access, or support us by becoming an Elite Member -- see if you qualify for a discount below.
-- Big Mike, Site Administrator
(If you already have an account, login at the top of the page)
I'm looking to buy a piece of software for testing and developing some trading systems as well as testing some manual trading techniques.
I have looked at many pieces of software and I think OpenQuant and Neoticker are probably the best 2 for my needs. I really like OpenQuant's event-driven model but they don't seem to offer much for non-automated traders and I'm a little concerned that their support might be a problem even though I have a good amount of programming experience.
Neoticker looks extremely powerful, and I think it will be able to provide me with everything I am looking for, but the learning curve seems to be pretty steep and I'm not familiar with delphi or all that excited about learning a proprietary language (like Formula)
At this point I'm considering either using OpenQuant in concert with another piece of software for the non-automated stuff I want to try (perhaps I will spring for the eSignal feed and use that platform) or just going with NeoTicker and taking a few months to get a firm handle on how to use it.
Any thoughts on this, or suggestions for other pieces of software would be helpful.
Can you help answer these questions from other members on NexusFi?
I have used Neoticker in the past and liked it a lot. Yes there is a learning curve. The Formula language wasn't that bad to learn. Also I found their support to be excellent.
Good question. I haven't excluded them completely and I would still consider them if anyone has any compelling reasons for me to go with one of them. Here are my reasons (other than I tend to dislike proprietary programming languages):
Amibroker - Little support for automated trading, but I like the price and speed and would consider using it in concert with another piece of software.
Multicharts - I didn't see it getting too many endorsements, and nothing about it struck me as exceptional.
Tradestation - I don't want to be locked into using them as a broker, and otherwise its expensive.
Wealth-Lab - I actually haven't looked into this one, but I will check it out now.
NinjaTrader - It doesn't seem all that customizable to me and I read that it can be slow. It struck me as something not geared toward programmers but instead tailored to traders that can program a bit.
I find myself a bit overwhelmed by all the options, so I may have jumped to some conclusions in narrowing my search. Please feel free to disagree with me or advocate any platform you may think would suit my needs.
In the past most of the users of this forum were focussing on NinjaTrader. Some have switched to MultiCharts.
In the end each product has its strengths and weaknesses.
NinjaTrader is excellent for order execution and charting, but there are some weaknesses such as backtesting and reliability. Could autotrade, but I would feel safe.
MultiCharts seems to be very stable, further more has the huge advantage that it can read EasyLanguage and all strategies that have been developped for tradestation during the last 15 years. Does not offer a DOM for order execution.
Amibroker is known for its excellent backtesting performance, but there are few users of AmiBroker on this forum.
Neoticker and WealthLab have few followers here. I have tried Neoticker once, but without really going into details. It did not make it onto my short list.
In theory Ninja is the most complete of the group, but in practice I found it cannot be trusted for automatic trading.
I've used Amibroker, OpenQuant and WealthLab.
For pure automatic trading OpenQuant would be my choice, because it uses a standard programming language, it is well and clean designed, and gives me that feeling of "order" I like very much when programming.
I found WealthLab a bit annoying, I didn't like it at all, but this is personal.
Ami is very fast and good if only it had more brokers choice and some modern features it would rocks.
You may also want to consider RightEdge. It is, as OpenQuant, a new generation software.
Fat Tails: Thanks for the help. I really would love to know what you didn't like about NeoTicker, I understand if you don't want to elaborate.
OpenQuant looks great, but the thing holding me back from trying it is that I'd still need to find a platform for charting and executing/managing non-automatic trades. Also the supposed lack of support is a bit of a concern. I don't want to put down a bunch of money for it and be left in the dark if I'm having issues with my data feed. I love that it allows strategies to work within a metastrategy, and I can't find this anywhere else, so that makes it hard for me to go with something else.
I think I should explain more about what I am looking for:
A good development platform that uses a real programming language (preferably). Learning a proprietary language isn't a problem at all, but I feel like the proprietary languages won't give me full control, but perhaps this bias is unjustified. More than anything I just want strategy development to be unconstrained. OpenQuant seems to be the best in this regard.
Solid backtesting and optimization. I haven't looked too much at how this is implemented in each, but Multicharts seems pretty awesome in this regard.
The software must be stable enough to automate trading strategies and run fairly well without me tending to it. I probably won't leave it completely unattended for long periods of time, but I would like to be able to leave for an hour or two without worrying about it.
I just want adequate support, nothing amazing, but I don't think I could put down $1000 on software with close to nonexistant support.
I would like to have some nice charting features. Most of these packages seem to have adequate charting for my purposes. Perhaps I could just use the free version of Ninjatrader to handle this for me. I basically just want to be able to use my own indicators, have a few drawing tools, be able to set up alerts, etc.
I would like to be able to manage discretionary trades with this software so I can get away from using IB's TWS.
I would like the software to be able to scan for chart patterns (either out of the box or programmed in).
Thanks for the help so far by all that have contributed to this thread. I will now start looking into RightEdge.
I would hands down recommend MultiCharts, but that is based on my experience. You can search and find I did a quick comparison of Neoticker, and I uninstalled it after a week, MultiCharts was just superior.
As for more info on Neoticker, try asking @aslan, I believe he has a good amount of experience with it and can probably provide more info good or bad about it.
BTW, MultiCharts will have a DOM and chart trader very soon (have seen it).
I can't wait for multicharts with dom and chart trader.
I trade discretionary, but I like to create and test systems, and I want to use only one platform.
Yesterday I tested a new idea with ninja, and the results were just plain wrong, I couldn't believe how the system tester messed up about 50% of the stop losses.
SierraChart is also a solid platform with everything included, but it looks like a thing of the past.
