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)
Well, the latest release of Multicharts 14 is pretty darn good.
Big positives:
1) Coding is not complex (Easy Language aka Power Language)
2) Efficient architecture....written in compiled C++.
I have a 4 year-old CPU, and even with fast E-Mini's coming in, I never go above 10% CPU Utilization.
3) rock-solid, never crashes, never freezes. I am using IQFeed for data, and Interactive Brokers for the execution/clearing platform.
On the other hand, Ninja Trader 8 has taken the automated (or semi-automated) market by storm.
It's not as efficient as MC-14 as I believe it was written in C# Dot-Net.
However, given that the programming language for indicators and signals uses C# and Dot-Net,
there's practically nothing that can't be done.
I've seen some really sophisticated "add-ins" for Ninja where the developers made it look like a whole new platform.
Also, I've heard good things about Sierra Chart, but I haven't researched it much at all.
Part of the performance boost (compared to TradeStation at least) is partially due to C++ and partially being a 64-bit application. Being able to address larger chunks of memory makes a huge difference.
There is not a huge difference in PC performance between TradeStation (v10) and MultiCharts (v14) while running automated strategies only. CPU utilization is very low in both cases (~10%), even when running multiple strategies on shorter time frames (<60 minutes). TradeStation gets into trouble if you are trying to do other things, such as strategy development, optimization, and other processor/memory intensive tasks. I've said this many times here on FIO, but you should not develop, test and/or optimize strategies on the same system that you are live trading (this is true for any sort of software development environment).
We trade live using both TS and MC. MC is the better of the two by far, IMHO. Switching to 100% MC would cause more business disruption than staying where we are, though we will move eventually.
@SidewalkAerobics ... @syswizard 's evaluation of MC is spot-on. I have had issues with both MC and TS in trying to reconcile strategy reports to actual trades, but some of that is on me. I use Sierra Chart for market analysis, but I don't really care to learn a whole new platform for development of automated trading. I am letting my subscription to SC lapse in the Spring, but that's another story.
If I were just starting out, I would probably go with MC. There are so many resources for learning EasyLanguage, and nearly all of that can be applied to PowerLanguage. It is also broker and data feed agnostic, so there are more options available. Unless TS decides to launch a 64-bit version of their application and really gives us a reason to stay on their platform, their days are numbered for us.
I agree, and add to that the terrific multi-threaded architecture of MC. My instance spawns over 100 threads....the most of any Windows applications I have used.
