Quote from Rabbitone:
I�m sorry you and others failed to grasp my analogy in the comparison between Ninja Trader and Tradestation. I was not singling out Ninja Trader or Tradestation for criticism or praise. Nor was I saying the Ninja Trader cannot do a Set Trail Stop. I was not trying to draw a defensive posture from Ninja Trader advocates. I have Ninja Trader on my PC and I am starting to code applications.
I'd like to chime in and say that I agree completely. Each tool has a purpose and audience who will benefit most from it.
What I am saying is Tradestation is a much more mature application than Ninja Trader. Many of the Tradestation 1000s applications, functions and strategies have had the �bugs� worked out of them. The Set Trail Stop has been in place 10 for more years from 2000I days. That is what I was attempting to address.
Valid points, of course.
At the same time, this is the "automated trading forum" so the assumption is that the O.P. was asking about writing code for an automated trading system.
Neither TradeStation nor NinjaTrader are "mature" in that sense, in my opinion for algorithmic trading.
They're both okay for historical testing as long as you don't need to use tick data but most automated traders need tick data testing.
Unfortunately, there doesn't at present exist any system which combines all the qualities you describe
and smoothly supports deploying strategies for fully automated trading.
That forces most truly automated traders to build their own custom platform. I did the same. Very painful. I got mine running after a gargantuan effort of programming.
Today I can find hundreds of �canned� Tradestation trading applications that make money. Ninja Trader is just beginning to show some promise in fulfilling this expectation. Tradestation has had years to try and get its platform optimized for efficient transaction processing (still has a way to go). Ninja Trader will probably go through many releases before it gains in efficiency (this from a Ninja Trader rater �Reliability: F (crashes all the damn time)�.
That's interesting. Do you know anyone that makes a living automated trading "canned" applications? Never heard of it myself. It seems the code in magazines is great for learning but always has holes that need filling to truly be used for algorithmic trading.
Ninja Trader will have to gain a wider acceptance from the trading community by producing trading applications that make profits over the long term. When I can pick up the TASC magazine and see Ninja Trader programming applications in articles with detail flow charts, then it will have arrived.
Again, are you talking about automated trading? NinjaTrader seems to excel at discretionary trading. I love NT's ability to draw a line on screen and a trade automatically gets entered if price crosses the line.
But after trying to use it for automated trading, I found that it has some serious shortcomings.
Tums made a excellent point. Many traders will have to learn Object Oriented programming. Since I first learned it in the 1990s it has come a long way.
That's valuable. But I feel a system can be built which a sufficient framework so that it doesn't require so much OO programming to build even complex models.
I recently released the one I built (TickZOOM) which solves many of these problems. But it's very new, of course.
The bottom line is Ninja Trader has many excellent features and will be an excellent platform in the long run. When I can hook up my DB2 or Oracle databases to Ninja Trader Data warehouse and perform data mining I will be thrilled.
Unfortunately, as a software architect, it became clear that NinjaTrader would have to start over from scratch to build sufficient performance and automated deployment into the system. Same goes for TS. TradeStation appears to be originally engineered for historical testing of bar data. Everything after that like real time trading or automated trading was an afterthought and works less than optimally.
For that reason, those performance features were built into TZ first instead of fancy GUI features. A GUI can always be built around a screaming fast and reliable engine.
Also, a lot of other stuff, like unlimited multi time frames, portfolio trading and stats, etc are all built into TZ that are missing in the others.
However, TickZOOM does nothing for discretionary traders except maybe for historical testing.
So you see. The point of my message is that every tool has a "niche" where it excels.
And unfortunately, software must be built for that specific niche from the beginning. If not, it's near impossible once you have many users or customers to change the design.
For beginners though, I suggest learning EasyLanguage first for 2 reason.
1. There so many EL examples of trading ideas in magazines and websites, it's valuable to be able to "read" those to learn the important trading concepts.
2. When implementing an algorithmic trading system, it will be necessary to graduate to object oriented either Java or C# to build a robust system that can handle all the exception situations.
Sincerely,
Wayne
