When it's free, yes.
3 Days to Save on a Lifetime License of NinjaTrader: Offer Expires 7/28
- Thread starter NinjaTrader_Comm
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When it's free, yes.
The keyword is: that long. Trust me, it doesn't take that long to find problems with Ninja Trader. I subscribed to them for one quarter and problems started to surface after just two weeks. There were missed trades, executed orders that shouldn't have been...their server is extremely slow and their software is totally unreliable for programmed trading or what they call trading based on "strategies". The only way that you can use their software on a paid basis is manual trading but then again, if you are going to just do manual trading, why not just trade directly from the broker's platform and just use Ninja Trader for the charts? Why pay to use something that's already available to you for free? The whole point of using Ninja Trader is for the strategy-based trading for which Ninja Trader is totally inadequate. So hence Ninja Trader is only good for sim trading.
OrderFlow by itself is a highly overrated strategy to use to gauge any direction of the market. First of all, it's unreliable as much of the order flows in the market are hidden or are reported to the exchanges with a delay so it's highly inaccurate in real-time. Second even if order flow reported is 100% accurate and comprehensive, it is still not a useful or reliable indicator to be relied upon to gauge future direction of the market. It only gives a snapshot of what the market participants are doing at this one particular moment but it doesn't mean they will continue to do the same in the future. Once the market changes, anything that happened all go out of the door and everything starts anew. Whatever market direction that the order flow predicted before would be all pretty much useless. The market supply/demand zones concept via support/resistance is even more overrated. These are zones that are determined artificially on a chart and in no way correspond to what actually happened in the market and in no way would predict where the market is going in the future. All in all, they are just nothing more than gimmicks designed to have you part with more of your money.
If I were you, I wouldn't want to invest in it and hence the lack of value, this lifetime license. Like I said, there is a reason why it's on discount. Everything is supply and demand.
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When was this?
If this is your experience it's no wonder you feel the way you do. I never used NT for any automated strategies, but I seem to recall several people on the boards who have done so and been happy about it.
Personally, I use NT as a manual trader placing trades with their chart trader. I could use the DOM from some other broker to place trades and free NT charting, but as NT (Dorman) is my broker and I do have a lifetime license I'm happy with doing that right now.
For me, NT7 was flawless. Never had any issues. When I started using NT8 I had a lot of minor issues, complaints and annoyances, but I'm happy about what I have now and have some coded stuff that I use which helps my trading. Being familiar with the platform is also something I value. Switching to something else now would mean learning a new platform and more coding.
The issues I've had do not relate to trade execution and fills which have been flawless.
I'm inclinded to believe you are right. I haven't checked out those tools myself yet, but might experiment with it and see if it can have some added value to what I'm already doing / looking at.
Well, if I were starting fresh it's quite possible I would have chosen another software, but as we humans are creatures of habit I'm staying with NT for now.
My biggest complaint with NT is that they used to support multiple brokers in futures, but later on eliminated all other options than Interactive Brokers and their own brokerage.
When was this?
If this is your experience it's no wonder you feel the way you do. I never used NT for any automated strategies, but I seem to recall several people on the boards who have done so and been happy about it.
Personally, I use NT as a manual trader placing trades with their chart trader. I could use the DOM from some other broker to place trades and free NT charting, but as NT (Dorman) is my broker and I do have a lifetime license I'm happy with doing that right now.
For me, NT7 was flawless. Never had any issues. When I started using NT8 I had a lot of minor issues, complaints and annoyances, but I'm happy about what I have now and have some coded stuff that I use which helps my trading. Being familiar with the platform is also something I value. Switching to something else now would mean learning a new platform and more coding.
The issues I've had do not relate to trade execution and fills which have been flawless.
I'm inclinded to believe you are right. I haven't checked out those tools myself yet, but might experiment with it and see if it can have some added value to what I'm already doing / looking at.
Well, if I were starting fresh it's quite possible I would have chosen another software, but as we humans are creatures of habit I'm staying with NT for now.
NT7 was the BEST! It only had some minor issues but overall it worked really well and it had some really nice features. Its C# compiler was easy to learn and even enjoyable to program. But it was creating apparently a large overall cost and took too much memory to run (according to them) so they decided to overhaul everything and got rid of many features, changed codes in NT8 and it was HELL!! It was slow as hell; it had many incompatibility issues. Some of my codes stopped working and I had to recode them. And when it finally ran, many of my commands weren't executed properly in real-time and the customer service reps. weren't able to help me at all. They knew it was the server problem but refused to acknowledge it and instead decided to blame it on my codes and pushed me to spend at least $500 an hour to hire 3rd-party consultants that they were in bed with to take a look at my codes. I was with Ninja Trader before they were a brokerage until they decided to dab into the brokerage business, from their NT7 to NT9 beta. Trust me, I can write a book about the "interesting" things that Ninja Trader did and probably still does. LOL I have seen so many of their customer service reps come and go. They used to not even publish their business address and you actually had to do a bit of digging to find out where they were located. Now of course they don't have a choice but to publish their business address because they are actually an NFT & CFTC regulated futures broker.
Orderflow really is overrated, to put it politely but I will let you find that out yourself.
Bottom line: You can still use Ninja Trader. It does have some of the best charts and charting capabilities. Hell I even configure my broker charts according to what I used in Ninja Trader. LOL But you just need to be aware of its limitations. Basically, do NOT use it for strategy-based trading, live or in sim. And trust me when I tell you their lifetime license is not worth it.
They used to support Philips and Dorman also as the only futures brokers besides their own. Now it looks like it's just them for futures. Wonder what happened to Philips and Dorman? Probably dropped them because they wanted the brokerage business all to themselves. For the platform, they still support a whole range of brokers, just less than before, probably just kept the ones with the highest number of users that pay.
Their lifetime license is the cheapest option. If you are a real daytrader in futures, your savings in commissions make that you have NT8 FOR FREE in a very short time. Not taking the lifetime license will cost you more money. And the datafeed is FOR FREE too.
For paper traders it is a different story.
If you pay $500 an hour, you are an idiot. My switch from NT7 to NT8 costed 50 euro an hour. The switch went smooth and without any problems.
You need to read what I wrote. That $500 an hour was for 3rd-party consultants that NT tried to push on me by refusing to acknowledge their server problems. My codes were fine. They were executed correctly at times but just not reliably so it was obviously NT's problem, not mine. If it was my codes' problem, they wouldn't have executed at all. Quite puzzled why you needed to pay for the switch from NT7 to NT8. It was free.
Like I said, NT is only good for sim trading.
The man who helped me was also a 3rd-party consultant.
The code from NT7 was not running on NT8. That was even mentioned everywhere on Ninjatrader's website. So my personal NT7 code had to be converted.
You traded with NT8 and didn't even know that the code did not run on NT8?????
Did you use magical self adapting code?
https://ninjatrader.com/support/for...-technical-support-aa/1098473-from-nt7-to-nt8
https://ninjatrader.com/support/for...tor-development/1077719-nt7-to-nt8-conversion
That's unfortunate. It seems like you should have stayed with NT7 for a while longer.
I went from being very happy with NT7 having zero complaints to pull my hair out with NT8. One example would be the cross-hair which I really like using on my charts. Something which LAGGED on NT8 and which they recommended users to not use for optimal performance. LOL?
Also, they stopped supporting daily, weekly and monthly RTH session charts. I could go on and on.
But as the versions improved and I coded my own stuff to suit my needs - NT8 works very well for me right now.
I'm inclined to believe you're right, but I do keep an open mind.
One benefit from their lifetime license is that the rates are better. If you do a lot of volume it quickly pays off.
It can't be that long ago they stopped using Phillips.
Ninjatrader brokerage have been an introducing broker for both Phillips and Dorman. They still use Dorman.
It seems like Ninjatrader is also their own FCM now, but allegedly a non-clearing FMC, so I suppose all trades clear through Dorman. I'm not up to speed on that. I'm still with Dorman.
In the past, Ninjatrader supported several other brokers too, like AMP, Mirus, etc.
These days, it seems like it's only Interactive Brokers which is a viable alternative to the NT Brokerage for futures.
With FX they have a bit more options.