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Words that come into mind when describing SC are speed, stability and customization.
Firstly, compered to Ninja, SC does not support other known data feeds like Rithmic/CQG/IB. If you are not looking to migrate to Denali data feed, then you are not going to have good time when problems occur. You will get zero support.
On the personal note, I have been using Denali data feed + SC order routing for a long time now. I have not run into any issues so far. Price tag is the same as Rithmic/CQG.
Secondly, one good plus for SC is all the well know indicators are free. Compered to Ninja, where you have to buy the indicators from content creators, SC has default library for almost all known studies. Most of the studies have source code available if you are into C++ and you can modify them freely or build on them.
Just like in Ninja there are content creators who build custom advanced indicator/auto-trading packages.
Thirdly, one of the bigger selling points for me was Spreadsheet Studies. This is basically Excel in SC, that support the same types of formulas as Excel and Calc. I can do real time data manipulation and build custom studies and advanced alerts without writing the code in C++.
SC is not as user friendly as Ninja. But over last few years the SC documentation has improved tremendously and almost all topics are covered in great detail.
I tried both back in the mid 00's. And went with NT because well it was free to sim and it looked nicer. As I advanced I purchased a few licences and and invested a considerable amount in coding. Both time of my own learning C# and paying for coding. But it was never good enough. Time after time something would happen performance related. Corruption of worksheets, histo data get trashed etc.
Of the things that its actually better at than SC it only promises to be better with an option that doesn't actually work. For example the strategy testing. It explodes memory use then crashes on anything slightly complex or long. It seems like the NT engineers don't understand what high performance is in relation to trading.
The last straw for me was NT8 release. It was promised to be much more but actually was far less. The change from minimum refresh rate of NT7 100 ms to NT8 250 ms was the dumbest thing I have seen in a trading software update in 20 years of using platforms. It was an admission of failure and giving up on NT performance from NT!!! There is a thread on NT forum started in 2017 with 128 post at last count asking for this to be fixed...... nothing!
Mean while SC,
I run three live instances on the same computer (you cannot do that with NT)
On another computer at the same time I use one of the same licences to do testing while my other systems run live. It can connect to the live SC instance and get histo data or download new data. Cannot to that with NT.
Some charts and DOMs are sub 100ms refresh rate.
All three instances take up less computer resources combined than 1 NT.
One instance of SC has 52 charts open with each chart approx 4000 lines of custom code sending data to an outside application and has never crashed or lagged!!
The histo data that SC store is easy accessed outside of SC. Good luck reading NTs binary data!!!!!
C++ rocks
At first SC Documentation and user interface seems bewildering but once you start to learn how its laid out the complexity is because of the massive amount of customisation of SC. I guess you cannot have huge options and simple docs.
I tried Ninja several times but I didn't like it. For some reason I just didn't click with it.
Sierra was really a struggle at the beginning and I hated it, everything seemed so complicated but I could see its potential since I could customize many indicators. After a couple of months I was very familiar with Sierra and after years I can say I know the platform inside out.
So I decided to stick with Sierra and I love it.
However I want to add something to this discussions: don't stick to just one platform, changing platforms or trying out different ones like Tradovate, Multichart, Tradestation etc.... is actually very useful. The way a platform is build will impact your perception of the market and trying out different platforms can give you a different perspective. One platform may solve some of your problems or highlight problems that were not visible and this can help you to go forward.
Maybe where you're at, those feeds aren't available with SC? Because I've seen or have been able to use SC with CQG and Rithmic, and have heard of others using SC with IB who don't want to just use IB's clunky TWS.
example:
I have NT7 lifetime, and it still has the decent graphics and visual clarity where I also have some custom indicators I haven't yet gotten to or been able to translate to Sierracharts and c++. And unfortunately TDA has stopped supporting their long time feed for NT7 last year. I like SC's basic dom ladder depth. And yes, I'd agree it's easy to put multiple instances of SC on the desktop with a light memory usage compared to a single session of NT7 which can quickly bog down a chunk of the system resources with multiple windows and indicators. Hopefully I'll get better at coding for SC and be able to be ready to move completely to SC from NT someday if there is a need to.
yes Sierrachart supports many different datafeed but as far as I know they dropped Rithmic. If you use old versions of Sierra Rithmic still works but they offer no support, I think there were some isssues also with CQG.
Sierrachart's policy is quite clear, they are pushing clients to use their datafeed. I must say that their datafeed is excellent so there is no reason to use others'.
Really? I used to trade with Rithmic and topstepTrader with sierrachart and I was forced to change platform because Sierra said would not offer support with Rithmic anymore. I wonder what happened, maybe their issue was with TST.
Thanks for the information anyway.
I have a lifetime NT8 license with IB. I also have investment in indicators/tools in NT8.
I recently started using SC with Denali Data feed which gives extended market depth (MBO) with ES for charting.
TL;DR If you are looking for low learning curve and simple development NT has the edge.
If you are truly serious about trading and system development, SC is probably a better choice. It is more stable and scalable.
Details
Ease of Use
NT is relatively easier to get going on. SC has a learning curve because its UI is engineering driven and not usability driven.
Using SC requires a large learning curve; you are better off buying some chart books to get going.
Enhancements.
The big challenge with NT is that they have stopped investing in the desktop platform. With their recent acquisition of Tradovate, their focus is moving to the cloud.
Small enhancement requests take years to come through. For example supporting MBO data or adding a Boolean option to their Footprint/Number Bars (to not show text)
Kinetick
NT started Kinetick data feed and that is recurring source of revenue.
-But maintenance of that is not being done properly. Twice in the last quarter it has stopped working due to some engineering changes in the interface between NT/Kinetick and IQFeed.
-After they started the Kinetick partnership they also started deprecating support for other data vendors like Rithmic.
Market Profile
SC profiling tools are vastly superior to what NT offers.
-NT TPO charts have a bug where they include the first minute of the next half hour.
-There is no splitting/merging of profiles
System Development
NT has a much lower learning curve.
However, NT has its limits especially when comes to scaling.
-SC can have multiple instances running on the same PC which share data. So you can have one process running live trading and another doing your calculations and getting over the limitations of a single thread CPU performance.
-Exporting data from existing studies on a chart is trivial in SC. SC's inbuilt/custom study set is much more comprehensive. You can then create your own database with study values which can then be used to train models etc.
I've been using both NT and SC for a very long time. I developed a whole lot of custom indicators and scripts for both, and after a long time now I have my personal trading setup for both platforms.
SC is more customizable and generally more powerful, in terms of things you can do with it, especially if you can program in C++.
NT is more user friendly, but it can get more difficult to set it and program it in the exact way you want to, although I finally managed to accomplish what I wanted to.
NT has an advantage in performance when you're using many charts at the same time, with lots of code running. It seems to me that NT has a better multithreading implementation, while in SC you have to run additional program instances, when it starts to get slower.
I have to say that NT is much more professionally managed, while SC is run by a group of fundamentalistic developers, which can program very very well, but often they take decisions based more on what they like or dislike than on customer interest. The one thing that really upset me, is how easy they drop support for platform brokerages/datafeed/technologies they don't like. And, even if they are not dropping support, if they don't like something, they implementation will often be somewhat problematic.
The best example of this is IB support. They criticize every aspect of IB, and probably they're right, and so they don't care much when a problem arise, for example when IB do some API updates. This is very unprofessional from the trader's point of view. If you support IB, and getting IB traders money to use your platform, you have to always provide a stable solution, even if you don't like IB. I'm serious in my trading, and if I invest time and money developing my solution with a platform, I need to be sure that SC will act in a professional way for a long time, but they don't. There are often problems with IB and SC is generally slow to resolve them, and it seems like they don't care about always providing customer with a stable IB solution. They even talk about dropping IB support in their forum, leaving traders in a state of uncertainty about the future.
On the other hand, NT has always provided a stable IB support, even providing a specific TWS version to use with NT. This is much more professional, and it makes me trust more about the future ongoing support.
That's why I'll drop SC in the near future. I don't want to beg in their forum anymore, only to ask for what should be taken for granted instead. I need certainties.
