it boggles your mind because you are apparently in the business of shilling for NT and not trading to generate PnL. No surprise you have difficulties to follow.
I try to spell it out very clear so that even someone a little thicker understands: It does not matter how much you pay for a piece of software, if it is prone of errors and cannot even handle orders and positions in a live trading environment correctly. So, stop bullshitting newbies into $50 deals, I recommend ANYONE (beginner, amateur, pro alike) to rather work 2-3 part time jobs (in case they do not have cash at hand) to make $10,000 to buy a piece of solid software that stood the test of time and has the stamp of approval than touting $50 crap that does not work. The 10k is a solid investment, the 50 bucks is a waste of money but ABOVE ALL A HUGE WASTE OF TIME.
Anyone looking to see what I mean regarding Ninja Trader, search this forum, search BigMike, search on the net what people have to say about NT and live order handling and management. LOL, enough said!!!
P.S.: Why is it only in this industry that normal people can be cheated into the idea that there are freebies (I chalk up $50 to being a freebie) given away and all one has to do is sit down, play around a bit, and voila, a new profitable strategy emerged. Why are people THIS DUMB? If I stood in front of a car dealership to hand out $50 NOBODY WOULD TAKE IT, there must be some sort of twist to it, right? Its only in this industry when people are blind due to greed.
Nothing has bankrupted more (wannabe) "traders" than G-R-E-E-D.
Quote from Mr_You:
I'll never understand this advice for newbs...
Why in the world would anyone spend so much time building trading software vs spending that time on developing profitable trading strategies?
It really boggles the mind and offers no help to someone so new.
And FYI... NinjaTrader is FREE for development and starts at $50/month for live trading. Really hard for anyone, except open source tools, to beat that. And "lock in" is really not an issue. Most traders have no problems porting their strategies.