I had the priveledge recently of attending a four-day workshop on RTS's automated trading product, RTD Tango. There why are how of the workshop can be found in a press release here at their website www.rtsgroup.net (.
Tango is a product used by small to mid size prop firms and some brokerages. They don't really cater to retail, but I know of at least one US brokerage that offers it to retail clients. It's roughly US$10K/month for a server with a bunch of clients. That sounds like a lot unless you manage a group of 10 traders using XTrader @ $1,500 per user... on someone elses server. I do neither but will at some point.
Tango is a client/server app. The server was built on C++ and runs on Linux, the client is a Java app. It uses a proprietary language with functions specific to the capital markets. Competitors in its space include Portware, Flextrade, and Orc, to name a few.
Being a Ninja user, both some major differences and major similarities struck me as interesting. The workshop forced me to look closer at what I trade and how I trade it, as well as how I code things. Workflow/process/clean code stuff which I normally don't look at as much as i should.
First, the downside. If you trade momentum and outrights, it offers no charts, and any technical indicators beyond the few provided must be coded by the user. You need to really be able to express your trade ideas in ways that can be coded.
On the upside, it handles multi-instrument strategies such as spreads very elegantly, and it handles multiple users elegantly, even if trading a single account. It is billed as being very fast, but playing the latency arb game was not necessarily suggested. Taking latency out of the trading model was suggested.
An eye-opener (or confirmation of many of the thoughts expressed by some here) was how little emphasis was placed on technical indicators, and how much emphasis was placed on platform stability and good executions. Most importanty, the emphasis was on having a good trade idea. The platform is merely a tool, and Whether you pay nothing or pay 10K won't make you a better trader.
In many ways it made me appreciate what we get basically for free with Ninja.
The workshop didn't get that deep into historical data management and reporting capabilities, but I'll be following up with the vendor on that.
Anyway, not sure how many of the community here get exposed to the higher-end products, so I thought this might give you an idea or two.