Quote from maxpi:
Openquant: if you are not a good C# programmer, forget it. They do not provide examples of code except on the forums, sometimes. The event driven coding is the greatest thing since sliced bread, it affords clarity of coding and should be the model for all other software. Having said that, you can make sure your coding in any other package is done in modules and approach the same level of clarity but it's not the same......... the backtester is not real speedy and the charts are just an add-on to display results of automated trades or backtests. The latest version of the software crashed my computer when I ran one of their packaged strategies on range bars, range bars are a new addition to the software and apparently aren't entirely working. They do respond to bug reports and requests for features astonishingly fast, apparently they are good enough programmers to have written maintainable software. Some data downloading features of the software I have never gotten to work properly... I had to use Ninjatrader to download the data, export it to a Microsoft format and then import it to Openquant. They have Openquant only as a way to demo their stuff and hook higher end pro traders into using their Smartquant stuff, they are not very user friendly for the little guy that is struggling with programming, I am dumping that stuff until I can take a few classes in programming, by that time they might have all the features in there and working.
Ninjatrader is coming on very strong as a market leading software. Their charting is on a par with Tradestation's imo and the chart trader feature is great for trading right off the chart, which I love, I hate typing in an order, always did, always will... I had problems with what appeared to be ambiguity between how bars were interpreted in backtesting and realtime, maybe it was my inability to understand what was going on with that but I dropped them as a backtester, I like Multicharts for backtesting. I'm not much of a C# programmer but with the examples of code provided by Ninjatrader I could do it. I can code up an indicator much faster in Ninjatrader than with "Easy Language"... The negative comments about Ninjatraders customer service seem ludicrous to me. They have, by far, the best forum for customer service. They answer questions on the forums within the hour typically. That stops kooks that would like to be on the forums and giving bad answers.
Tradestation 2000 is very prone to giving me fits, it's day has come and gone for sure. I was able to use the Radarscreen as a backtester of sorts however, I don't recall the details of how I did that, but I could test strategies on hundreds of stocks over month's worth of intraday data in fairly quick time. Managing that much data was a nightmare.
Tradestation 8 is fine really but the interface to the brokerage is poor. I abandoned it because of that. With Multicharts, Openquant, Ninjatrader, etc. you can query TWS and have account information, position information, etc. The only way I would use TS8 is if I went from trading futures to stocks. I could use the Radarscreen as an automated stock trading front end for TWS but they frown on trading with their software with another broker. They contractually disallow it in fact but I doubt they enforce it......
The latest version of Multicharts has recaptured my attention, I have a license for the software but was waiting for a better brokerage interface, which seems to have arrived. I can do everything I ever need to do in Easy Language so there is no programming limit for me in Multicharts, the charts look good, etc.
Just my two cents, overviewish look at the softwares I have played with, enjoy........ [/B]
