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I would advise that ninjatrader is not the right platform for scalping. The problem you have with ninjatrader is that you cannot use the platform to connect to a broker of your choice. Ninjatrder will only allow to trade on the brokers of their choice and will try and get you to sign up to their NT brokerage. As you will be aware with a scalping strategy, trade costs are imperative to the strategy success. The broker options available to NT users are very limited and very retail so the you will have to pay retail commisions that will kill most scalping startegies. The latest development is that @NinjaTrader are supporting the closure of threads on this forum where extra connections are merely being discussed.
If you look a the other platforms availalbe such as cTrader and Multicharts, both have a FIX connection that would allow you to connect to a scalping broker of your choice, whih is pretty much a requirement for scalping.
I'm a borderline scalper (most trades last <1 min, take ~20 trades/day) and I use NinjaTrader8. I'm also with their broker (I was originally with Mirus Futures, which was bought by NT when they expanded to brokerage services).
I've never really branched out try other platforms but I'm pretty happy with Ninja. Their support is always strong, the platform works great, etc.
Broker: NT Brokerage, Kinetick, IQFeed, Interactive Brokers
Trading: ES
Posts: 159 since Dec 2014
Thanks Given: 40
Thanks Received: 166
I would disagree with this sentiment. There are definitely cases in which if tools such as indicators or strategies are developed improperly, you could have a similar experience. However, I also firmly believe that properly written indicators and strategies will not crash the platform and are very performant as well as scale to hundreds or even thousands of symbols with NT8.
My question would be, what's your interpretation of scalping? Are you talking 1-2 points on ES CL, or 2-3 ticks? If it's the former, NT8 is a great choice. For the latter, you have bigger issues to deal with first such as transaction costs which have already been mentioned. There are supported brokers which offer tiered approaches depending on your volume which could mitigate to some degree.
Scalpers (successful) know very well what their expectancy is per round trip including the slippage that you are inevitably going to incur, not always, but enough to where it must be accounted for.
If you have a profitable scalping strategy, I'd recommend spending your energy on these topics instead of platform:
Proper programming techniques
Aggressive or passive entry/exit
Monthly volume
Colocation
Latency (platform, broker, wire, etc)
Partial fills
As an example, I have a scalping strategy which uses a target of 6 ticks with a stop loss of 5 ticks on ES.
Anything over 50/50 or even a little less is profitable, right? Nope!
For me to be profitable, I need, at minimum, 53% accuracy because I know I must overcome 1.33 ticks per trade just because of fixed costs (broker, exchange, regulatory, slippage, etc). At that slightly better than break even point, my expectancy was 0.126 ticks when I hit my target.
When I was testing this strategy on MES, I had 1.38 ticks to overcome! That translated to an expectancy of 0.101 ticks per trade.
0.126 ticks doesn't sound like much but week over week, month over month, numerous times a day, it adds up.
I would agree 100%. I've been a point & click futs scalper for more than 10 years and NT is too slow if you are talking real scalping. The 250 ms min refresh is a joke. If you have a fast market or trying to hold stops at a certain level you are going to be behind everyone.
Most prop (when I was doing it) are on TT or CQG IC and getting close to true streaming rates. Most insto algos are blazing fast.
You can actually see how slow 250 ms is on a DOM by using SierraChart. Set the SC DOM at 20-50 ms then a linked price study at 250ms on the same DOM. Its surprisingly sh!t full how behind it is when the market is moving.
Interesting. So the average reaction time is 250 ms.
add latency from the exchange to receive the data 100-250 ms (at best)
and then send an order back - the same 100-250 ms
That's already coming up to 0.5 - 1 second. I would suggest having a piece of software adding aggregating data at another 250 ms isn't high performance software for scalping.
But there is another part to the refresh rate outside of reaction times. Its the information you receive with unfiltered data stream watching orders being refreshed and pulled with a fast system or completely miss it with a slower DOM.
When I read your first post, my question was simply, what do you mean by "scalping?" -- as there are many styles and methods of scalping, and even many ideas about what "scalping" is.
Then I read this post, which answers the question well enough.
You can see from the different answers that some traders will say yes and others will say no. As a trader with a similar timeframe (a bit shorter, but similar), I would not hesitate to use NT -- but I don't ( ), I use Sierra Chart instead, mainly because of its speed and its stability. But I think NT is good enough. You should have a fast PC because it is something of a hog for resources and you should have relatively few indicators or charts up for the same reason, but these can be managed easily enough with hardware. I have used it and wouldn't have a problem, keeping in mind the hardware issues. I know many traders who post their trades on futures.io and who scalp just fine with it.
(I know you said not to mention any other platforms, but that basically means you won't get a good range of responses, since there would be no discussions of pros and cons in a comparative sense.)
I have considerable respect for both @Jasonnator and @Trembling Hand for their technical knowledge (I don't know anything about their trading, but am willing to accept their word about it), and you can see that one says "yes" and one says "no," and each has good and relevant-sounding reasons. This is not unusual in the world of trading, no matter what the subject is.
Here is the best advice anyone can give anyone about trading, assuming that the very basic issues have been covered: Open a live account and trade with it. You will soon find what is good and what is not, for you, and then can make a better decision. If it's OK, then you will be happy. And if it's not OK, you will know better what you should look for.
I hope you find the responses in this thread useful and that you have a successful experience with your trading, however you decide.
Bob.
When one door closes, another opens.
-- Cervantes, Don Quixote
), I use