NinjaTrader vs OpenQuant for automated trading

Quote from jdeezero05:

You should check out the ninja forums, I've not a very experienced programmer but didn't have much trouble getting the VIX into a YM strategy. There is an add instrument functions for strategies that works pretty simply. A second instrument in an indicator is where the problem is but I believe that will be fixed in 7.
I do understand your other points completely. Neoticker seems like it would be the best but needs to be totally redone at this point, it just feels like a hodge podge at this point. Openquant is the clear choice if you have experience but If you don't have experience it sounds like you will hit a wall and not have the support to get over the wall.
Ninja is incredible at what it does but it just doesn't do it all yet. I imagine Ninja 9 or 10 will make Ninja the clear leader in this area by a long shot but what to do until then is the problem.
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This pretty much sums it up. I spent a few hours going over NeoTicker's documentation. They have a lot. So far I'm leaning towards this. I hate the idea of hardware activation so that's a big negative (I live in europe so I'll surely get hit with over 20% in customs fees).

I'm a Java developer, never used Visual Studio though I did use VB about 12 years ago. So I'mwondering if I could pick up OpenQuant with its limited support.

At least I've got it narrowed down to these two.
 
Who told you OQ support is limited? :)

Some people who've got their strategy fixed in an hour after they posted on SQ forums say that the support is excellent and life is wonderful, some others, with less luck, say that life sucks and SQ must die :eek:

Seriousely speaking I think we should separate new feature requests and certain improvement requests from strategy programming and how to support. Although we can leave some feature requests uncommented (though I do know that our users don't like it) but I don't think we have any (well, many ...) unanswered how to requests on our support forums... especially if we know the answer :D

After all you can use our custom development services and ask us to develop one or two specific strategies for you. This is usually a good start for people who want to get up and running their auto trading strategies asap but who are still in the process of learning C# and general programming tricks and tips.

Cheers,
Anton
 
Quote from cunparis:

I'm a Java developer, so learning C# isn't a problem.

The problem is that my experience has taught me that the less programming one does the better. So it's good to find a platform which can minimize the programming. :)
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---> this is a ridicluous comment
 
Quote from OpenQuant:

Who told you OQ support is limited? :)
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Excuse me I actually misspoke. From what I've read the documentation is limited but when one asks questions to the forums the support is ok.

Several people have told me that it is time-consuming to learn because one has to read the api and find things out by trial and error, searching forums, etc.

I'm also concerned about it working with IQ feed. It says on the homepage that it works with IQ Feed but in the forums there is someone who is stuck because it's not working. And there is no official response to his question (http://www.smartquant.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=6577).

I do hope you can improve the documentation to help developers be more productive.
 
Hi Guys,

This is an old post I'm wanted to pull back into the forum because both software companies (NT and OQ) have upgraded since what I saw the last posting to be, in 2008 I think.

Looking at Ninja Trader 7 (64Bit) vs OpenQuant software as a platform to develop and later run short term automated trading (no not high freq.) using the C# language.

I'm less interested in snazzy chart and visual features, and more interested in the core competency of the software, its stability, ability to interface with non-retail financial dealers/brokers/API, its ability to utilize computer hardware, and finally client support from the producer of the software (not simply community intellectual yoga exercises on message boards, but someone to call on the telephone.)

Anyhow guys, I thought the discussion may be helpful to more people than myself on ET. If there is another competing vendor that should be discussed, I'm ears.

Thanks,
Red
 
Since the last post I've only been working w/NT7 (64-bit) and previous versions of NT.

Here's what I can tell you after 7-8 months of using NT7:
1) It has never crashed on me in live auto trading. The old memory bloat issues seem to have dissipated. No need to reboot every 2-3 days. Now, I try to reboot it every 2-4 weeks b/c the memory does bloat eventually and I don't want to take any chances on a crash.

2) It recovers from dropped data connections w/o a hitch. My strategies have not been adversely effected by reconnections.

3) If you're not working w/tick data (at least for backtesting on NT) and don't need to extend the platform then I think it's a reliable platform for autotrading.

However, I only trade a couple of instruments. I don't know how it would perform on 100's of stocks. Also, you can't alter the data feed. I tried to alter the tick data feed by putting a layer of code between the data provider and NT but I found out that NT doesn't permit this.

3) It's still nearly worthless when backtesting with tick bars.

However, I'm pretty sure almost all of the other retail platforms load backtesting data the same way. The exception is OpenQuant, which allows you to store bars objects to be called in testing as needed. All of the other providers should be handling this the way OQ does. Having said that, I wouldn't use OQ even if they gave me my $800 back. Unreliable support makes OQ a much riskier bet than most platforms. Maybe OQ has changed since then?

Good luck,
Lou

P.S. I'm probably switching to an institutional platform. I'll know for sure in the next few weeks. The main reasons are the painfully slow backtesting speeds w/tick data in NT and the inability to create inhomogeneous time series (b/t the data provider and NT).
 
Quote from RedEyeFly:

I'm less interested in snazzy chart and visual features, and more interested in the core competency of the software, its stability, ability to interface with non-retail financial dealers/brokers/API, its ability to utilize computer hardware, and finally client support from the producer of the software (not simply community intellectual yoga exercises on message boards, but someone to call on the telephone.)
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I think NinjaTrader only connects to the brokers on the NinjaTrader list. There is no easy way to add support for different API/broker connection. SmartQuant may or may not be more flexible here.

In addition, I would consider

1) a relative number of bugs in the software (any complex software has bugs - just some developers prioritize fixing known bugs while others concentrate on adding features)

2) whether updating to a new version of the software breaks your code. Ideally, you expect the code written 4-5 years ago to work on the most recent version without modifications.
 
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