ninja trader vs tradestation

What are pros and cons of ninja trader vs tradestation. Which is more stable?

NT's a Low Budget Development, still in infancy... This is supposed to be an advanced programmable front end but, they try to restrict the user to utilize the platform within very tight boundaries set by themselves. One has by far more freedom of on a tradestation than NT

What about meta trader 4?
That is a really good free platform!

jeffsmith said:

NT's a Low Budget Development, still in infancy... This is supposed to be an advanced programmable front end but, they try to restrict the user to utilize the platform within very tight boundaries set by themselves. One has by far more freedom of on a tradestation than NT

Click to expand...

Never used NT, but heard that it's good - but being a TradeStation user, Jeff's reply makes me wonder if it's worth looking at it yet. I know there are several forum readers who have used both, perhaps we'll get more opinions.

I use Tradestation and cannot comment on Nt, but you might also want to consider Amibroker, which has quite a strong customer programming side if that is required and it is a one-off cost of around $200.

AmiBroker - Download

AmiBroker - Support zone

It also has APIs to intergrate with Esignal and Interactive Brokers. I don't use it any more, but that is simply because I have moved to TS.

Charlton

jeffsmith said:

NT's a Low Budget Development, still in infancy... This is supposed to be an advanced programmable front end but, they try to restrict the user to utilize the platform within very tight boundaries set by themselves. One has by far more freedom of on a tradestation than NT

Click to expand...

Really? The C# that NT uses seems a lot more powerful than tradestation's easylanguage. I haven't had a good look at TS though, so not sure. Some of the stuff people have done wiht NT is very impressive though - FinAlg's market profile mod for example.

One advantage of NT is that it's free for sim - I'd be more inclined to try TS if I didn't have to set up an account with them.

yup, that's the downside to TS. You get locked in with their brokerage.

I also heard that NT is evolved, faster than TS at least.

The one criticism of NT that I heard which put me off is that NT does not allow you to reference previous bars' values of a variable using the [1] notation.

I heard that NT is the most popular software. Trade station was just behinde as a second one.

Anyway if I download a NT then with which broker I should open an account?

Could you suggest any?

Regards,
LI

fifty2aces said:

Really? The C# that NT uses seems a lot more powerful than tradestation's easylanguage. I haven't had a good look at TS though, so not sure. Some of the stuff people have done wiht NT is very impressive though - FinAlg's market profile mod for example.

One advantage of NT is that it's free for sim - I'd be more inclined to try TS if I didn't have to set up an account with them.

Click to expand...

london_investor said:

I heard that NT is the most popular software. Trade station was just behinde as a second one.

Anyway if I download a NT then with which broker I should open an account?

Could you suggest any?

Regards,
LI

Click to expand...

Mirus Futures and Amp Futures will both give you a demo account with free data. I've had accounts with both, and the only difference was that Amp constantly called me to ask if I had any questions, which was pretty annoying.

Thanks everybody!

My company is going to use NT with Mirus as the broker. The decision was motivated by business considerations, but may be good for technology reasons also.

I now think the big key for stability is the back end, the market connection, and have my hopes for ZenFire that Mirus uses.

Have been using Ninja with AMP. So far it's working well and the guy from AMP walked me through the setup. He calls once in a while and e mails but thus far he's no bother
The demo is fro 30 days I believe. The program seems robust but I am just using the very basics.

Perfect

Thank you a lot!

Li

fifty2aces said:

Mirus Futures and Amp Futures will both give you a demo account with free data. I've had accounts with both, and the only difference was that Amp constantly called me to ask if I had any questions, which was pretty annoying.

Click to expand...

Thank you for your previous help

Coul you tell me in a few words why Ninja Trader is better than (for example) an account with SaxoBank or Barcalys...?

Also if possible - can I use guarantee stop loss when I play with Mirus or Amp? What is the minimum funds I have to put into the account?

Sorry if I am asskng you too much

Warmly,
Li

fifty2aces said:

Mirus Futures and Amp Futures will both give you a demo account with free data. I've had accounts with both, and the only difference was that Amp constantly called me to ask if I had any questions, which was pretty annoying.

Click to expand...

The last time I tried and then checked NT didn't work at all on some Vista distros, this may have changed but I'd check.

Thank you

Li

jimbob42 said:

Have been using Ninja with AMP. So far it's working well and the guy from AMP walked me through the setup. He calls once in a while and e mails but thus far he's no bother
The demo is fro 30 days I believe. The program seems robust but I am just using the very basics.

Click to expand...

ahardy66 said:

yup, that's the downside to TS. You get locked in with their brokerage.

I also heard that NT is evolved, faster than TS at least.

The one criticism of NT that I heard which put me off is that NT does not allow you to reference previous bars' values of a variable using the [1] notation.

Click to expand...

Do you mean

// Current bar opening price
double barOpenPrice = Open[0];

// Opening price of 10 bars ago
double barOpenPrice = Open[10];

(from the NT website)

The NT programming looks very powerful to me

cheers
Xeno

Xeno said:

// Current bar opening price
double barOpenPrice = Open[0];

// Opening price of 10 bars ago
double barOpenPrice = Open[10];

(from the NT website)

Click to expand...

Oh, guess I'm talking bollox then. Sorry - just mindlessly passing on what I heard from someone else. I shall also mindlessly pass on that I heard that have a major upgrade in the pipeline that will improve NT significantly.

I plan to check it out myself and ditch TradeStation soon, but until then, I have no direct knowledge.

Hi,

Ive been using Ninja Trader for a little while now and can highly recommend it. The C++ development is extremely flexible and easy to get to grips with if you have done any programming before.

I trade directly through Interactive Brokers so havent used the trading functionality but the charting, strategy and market analyzer functionality is all very good.

And not sure if its due to Ninja Trader compiling the code rather than interpreting it, but performance is very good as well. I frequently have around 20 charts open with many customer indiciators and strategies (including a market analyzer screen) and dont notice any slowdown.

It does have a few problems though. Firstly, its data loading techniques are problematic. Difficult to explain without going into detail but it has caused me a few headaches. And secondly, plotting indicators from multiple timeframes on the same chart requires a few workarounds.

Both of these issues are apparently being addressed in their next release however which should be out in Beta by the end of the year.

But best of all . . . . . its free! (kind of)

NinjaTrader is written in C# (C-Sharp), not C++. C# is a powerful object-oriented language that runs on the Microsoft .Net Framework. It is compiled first to Microsoft Intermediate Language. Then compiled again to machine code when executed. The 2nd stage run-time compilation allows the platform to take advantage of any processor-specific optimizations if available. C# is widely used for developing business software for it's support and tight integration with database servers. Search for C# on the web and see how many thousands of results you get. It allows your NinjaScript to do a lot more than any scripting platform just for trading. The downside to all that power is that it may be harder to learn.

I use Tradestation personally.

pros -
- lots & lots of code out there for you to plug into your systems
- it's component based, so whilst it's not really OO, it is structured
- you can write DLLs and plug them into TS - which means it is extensible
- there is a huge community of TS developer out there traders laboratory, TS forums etc
- strategy automation tools, analysis, stock screener, charts, radar screen
- tight data/broker integration
- runs in memory - so it's quick
- interactive debugger

cons
- order management is quite sucky from the language, you don't get all the order types that you have from using it manually
- support take some nudging to help you out
-sharing data between charts/radars/strategies isn't in std product - a free DLL is available
- scripts are executed on ticks, and I feel that you should be able to run code on different events - times, rejections etc. Saying that you can still do all you want once you get your head around the timing cycle

In terms of 1 language vs another language - I'm not sure what you'd need to do that isn't possible in TS.

What I'd like to see is a full comparative analysis between TS, Amibroker, Ninja, Meta Trader etc.

After going through the pain of learning one platform and making it perform, I'd rather not learn another until I know what the supported features are. I have looked around but not found a good comparative analysis though.