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I'm a Ninjatrader user and wanted to hear from anyone who's used both platforms. I'm primarily interested in algo trading and backtesting. How far back does backtesting go in TradeStation? Anyone converted their strategies from Ninjascript into Tradestation and was it difficult?
Thanks in advance!
Can you help answer these questions from other members on NexusFi?
That's BS. @cory, usually your responses are very helpful and insightful, not sure what happened here...
People switch all the time from Ninja to TS. People also switch from TS to Ninja.
I use both (although now I only develop in TS, and use Ninja as an order bridge), and converted some strategies back and forth. Assuming you can do the conversion (you obviously have to know NinjaScript and Easy Language), you should be able to do the conversion. But even then...
The strategy backtest engine can act differently for some situations for both platforms
AND
Depending on your data provider, the continuous contract data with futures (and possibly stock data, depending how splits are handled, and forex data since all forex data sources are different) will cause differences, sometimes quite significant.
I personally recommend picking one platform and sticking to it, until some issue or capability forces you to switch.
As an aside, I have converted from Tradestation to Ninja, Multicharts and MT4. In ALL cases, the conversion is never perfect, and the results are never the same. I've seen good strategies in one platform perform terribly in other platforms.
Also, backtesting in TS can go as far as the data, I usually do 10 years with no problem. Only 6 months of tick data though.
Last year I opened an account with tradestation to test out the platform and see if I would move from ninja. I really did quite like the tradestation platform but decided to stay with ninja.
I already had long experience with c# so there is nothing in ninja i couldn't accomplish, I gave tradestation easy language a go and it is a nice coding language, but ultimately for me personally I was used to having access to object orientated programming and native easy language does not accomplish this. While I could create custom DLL's that would plug in to tradestation and give me the additional flexibility, I just didnt have the time to pursue this path.
Just so not to start a flame war about the virtues of easy language vs c#, I acknowledge the same things could probably be accomplished through easy language but it really came down to time vs outcome for me (having c# experience already).
Yes, switching costs can be significant, so a lot of time it is easier to stay with what you have.
The old saying is that Tradestation was written by traders for traders, while Ninja was written by programmers for programmers. That does not mean one is better though.
Tradestation has some powerful OOEL in latest version, but you can't backtest with it - that for me at least makes Tradestation OOEL nearly useless. I just hope they don't retire Easy Language one day.
it's correct that you can't backtest OOEL order objects as they only work in realtime, but besides that you can use almost all other OOEL in a backtest.
Hi @pnguyen720,
I am also working with both platforms and the difficulty of the code conversion will depend on the complexity of your code and your skills in both languages. Some features might have to be worked around in another language, others might not be available at all, but most of the time there is a good chance that you can convert a logic from Ninjatrader to Tradestation or vice versa.
One thing I like about Easylanguage is that you can test a lot of ideas quickly and I would encourage you to check out some of the excellent webinars @kevinkdog held to see that it is possible to code profitable strategies with just a few code lines.
I am on my way to fund my account to get TradeStation. I will keep NT7 also. It seems to me that any futures trader that is serious should have TradeStation.
