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)
yesterday, after handling with a OCO-problem, I asked myself what are the differences in programming if I want to go live with a strategy.
During backtesting only at the open of a new bar orders are triggered, so I think there is a little difference and maybe you have to change your code for live-trading.
Because I'm not new to programming but to NinjaTrader I wanted to know what are your experiences or best-practices and what are the changes in code to go live with the strategy. Error-Handling is also an interesting point ...
Thx in advance
DT
Can you help answer these questions from other members on NexusFi?
There is a lot to cover on this subject, but some advice I hope you take to heart is this:
Always test your strategy in simulation mode in a live market before allowing cash trades.
I have learned too many times that something did not behave as expected, but only after I started placing live trades. These things did not show up in Market Replay and especially did not show up in backtesting.
Some examples I can think of:
One strategy that focuses on longs, a separate on shorts, each trying to open or close a position. [only if you have two separate strategies on same instrument]
Stop orders - in general.
Limit orders - in general.
Hopefully some others will chime in as well. There is a LOT to cover on this topic
Could you explain it in more detail. I would prefer some code-snippets
Do you use only Market-Orders in Strategies, when you say there could be a problem with stops and limits?
From my point of view I used in other tools such things like:
check trading-hours
check price and order-server availability
check CurrentBar > XY
check current position of the strategy
...
Maybe it could be the target of this thread to produce a template for strategies, with code-snippets to start live-trading, multiple comments included ... to prevent errors in live-trading ...
there are standard NT approaches that are recommended to do using methods onbarupdate, onorderupdate, onorederexecution, onpositionupdate, again we might need to wait for NT7 for better order processing control. That control could depend on data provider.
These problems are really not easy to explain, but basically...
I only use market orders in strategies anymore. This is because limit orders have several problems with backtests.
Everything I say below is assuming BACKTESTING not live trading:
First, if at any time on a bar your limit price is hit, it will be filled. Let's say you have a 5m bar or some other bar which can be large. Say your target is 4 ticks. Price can be at the top of the bar and falling, fill your LONG limit order, and then close on the low without ever going +1 tick after filling you, yet Ninja will show a profitable trade if there was 4 ticks between the bar open and your limit price. Ninja doesn't know the OHLC order, I get that.
Second, you try to set your profit target to not ever fill on bar #1. At least 2 bars are required. This plays it 'safe'. If you call SetProfitTarget after BarsSinceEntry() > 1, it will still show profit target on bar 1, even though it was called on bar 2 and during bar 1 no PT even existed.
Third, if you name your orders the same (ie "long" and "short") and you set your profit targets in #onbarupdate say right after the Enter() command, many times NT has the wrong PT values because it was left-over from a previous signal. If a signal 5 entries ago had a target of 4 ticks, NT screws up and doesn't always recalculate the new PT based on the new entry.
Needless to say, I wrote a lot of code that fixes all of these -- to the best of my knowledge -- but still I just prefer to deal with market orders in strategies given all my negative experience with limit orders.
Stop orders are just as bad. A stop limit order is twice the fun. The stop price can be met, the limit price never hit after the stop order was placed, yet ninja will show it filled, again all because OHLC order is unknown.
I do not know why NT cannot simply assume the worst OHLC order. Would be nice. Or it would be nice to have a menu option to never allow PT on bar #1 as well.
Not practical when trying to test 1 year of data. Hell, not practical when trying to test more than a couple weeks.
But all of this backtest talk is steering me off course. I am really trying to stay away. I spent over a year on this stuff and have nothing to show for it, with the exception of identifying tons of bugs. I am not getting paid by NT so that is worthless.
My focus is 100% discretionary. Backtesting is just useful to me in the idea of proving an approximate concept is approximately profitable.
