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)
Yep, there's lots of flexibility with the Zig Zag indicator. SC definitely has a steep learning curve but once you get on top of it, no big deal. Extremely powerful.
Use the "Period OHLC" study, you can define whatever you want with it.
I hated the UI out of the box, but made some changes to Windows that make it a little more tolerable.
I did, and didn't really care for it much. It was pretty but I didn't like being tied to one ecosystem for everything, plus at that point in time it was still rather buggy. I've tried just about all of the major platforms and always came back to SC.
Sierra has not crashed once on me and that's what I love about it. Fyi I asked them a few weeks ago about implementing a black theme and they said they're working on it so I'm looking forward to that update.
Oh yeah, that would be sweet instead of having to use all the workarounds I did. And I can echo your comment on the reliability... it is one fine piece of software, those guys are damn hard core.
I like the layout, you can go one step futher if you want bit more screen space.
Specially when you have lot of small chart. You can hide Title Bars from Chart menu.
Having done some reading on this site and others now, I'm noticing a lot of people who've gone from NT so Sierra 'bashing' NT, but I haven't read anyone going from Sierra to NT, I think.
The exception seems to be bobwest.
I'm not sure if you said anything else beyond liking NT better, bob. Mind me asking specifically if there's anything in particular which made you go back to NT?
Good question. Not necessarily easy to answer, since personal preferences are hard to nail down sometimes.
To begin with, in this forum at least, the more usual choice has been NT. This has many reasons, but I think the history of the forum had something to do with it: @Big Mike, who started it all, initially used NT, and most of the early forum members adopted it as well, partially on its own merits, partially perhaps because it's what they saw here.
But nothing is perfect, and over time a number of people -- including @Big Mike -- went looking for something that didn't have the faults that they found in NT. Some -- including @Big Mike -- found what they were looking for in SierraChart, and many became passionate about it. There are many things to like in SC, but my point is that, having found it, many became enthusiasts for it. This is especially true in this thread, which is explicitly about SC being a better platform. (Just read @josh's initial post launching the thread.)
Now, in terms of raw power, features and speed, this has often been a reasonable conclusion. NT, the company, made many mistakes, in my view, and one was to rely on the easy extensibility of the program via its programming language to not include basic things, such as volume profile, that people wanted but could only get from either third-party providers or, basically, user talent such as @Fat Tails, @gomi and many others who filled in what was missing, posting their indicators for free on this forum. NT even explicitly said that they didn't want to disrupt the "NinjaTrader ecosystem" of for-profit third-party external providers by putting these standard things into their platform. They should have just gone ahead and kept the platform growing, and in my view they did not.
Also, they flubbed the transition to NT8, which took years and which initially just produced a bug-filled, unstable and unsatisfactory platform that the users had to be the beta testers for.
In the meantime, SierraChart was rock-stable, full-featured, comparatively speaking, and very fast. And it kept making incremental changes, instead of promising that everything would be better when the next version (NT8) came out.
Well, I just gave the case for leaving NT for Sierra, didn't I?
I have been fiddling with Sierra for some time. I do like it, and always did. I didn't have the intensely unsatisfied experience with Ninja that drove many to find an alternative -- which does not mean that I ever thought it was perfect, but nothing ever really is.
Recently I spent a good month soaking myself in SierraChart. This was a very deep soak, because, as a programmer, I went deeply enough into its programming model to begin to do the things with SC that I have built up over the years in NT. This was not really easy going, partly just because anything has a learning curve, and partly because whoever writes their documentation and is in charge of their website obviously has never had to use any other documentation or has ever visited any other website in his entire life, and so has no idea how to put together anything that anyone can use.... (well, this is just my personal peeve, but since we are talking about personal passion here, this is one of mine. )
So, after starting to get things set up the way I wanted them, I took a look at my old NT7 (yes, 7!) charts and said, damn, I like those better, and NT sure is simpler, isn't it? (Of course,it's simpler to me, and that's because I'm used to it.... we are talking personal preferences here, which is my point.) Then I decided to be brave and downloaded the current NT8 version, and decided I would put the energy into it rather than Sierra.
Did I say much, in all that, that went much "beyond liking NT better," as you asked? Not really.
It's personal preference for me. I think there was a time when SC was probably a clear winner, and for some it will still be. This is much less so now that NT8 is finally usable (not everyone will agree, I imagine, but I find it so). Also, I have a hell of a lot of small little bits of custom code that makes NT the way I like it. It is easier to port that stuff over to NT8 than to SC.
But basically, unless you have very particular requirements, or are very passionate for one thing and also against another, I don't think that the platform is necessarily a real major choice, assuming it hits the basics. I have used much worse than either of these and it was OK.
If you take a good long look at SierraChart, and put it to its full use, and get past the steep learning curve, I think anyone will say that it is a great platform. If you fall in love with it, and many do, or if you have a huge dissatisfaction with NT, and many do as well, then it will be great for you.
It certainly will do the job that you need done. Beyond that, I do think that it's just what you like. That's pretty much it.
-- found what they were looking for in 
