Thought I'd post an update for those interested.
This week I used NinjaTrader, MB Trading's software, and IB's software.
I set up a watch list in MB Trading but MB crashed when I tried to export it. As a result, I lost it. Considering it took over half our to make, I was very disappointed.
Same thing happened with IB. TWS stopped at midnight and when I reloaded it, my watchlist was gone.
I don't really have tolorance nor patience for this kind of thing. The software should be idiot proof.
that said, MB Trading was very intuitive and I was able to learn it without reading any documentation. I really like that. IB's TWS is very unintuitive and it's not easy to learn. I understand that an investment is required here, but it's hard to do when IB is "down" all weekend (I'm in France so they come back online Sunday night at 6pm).
I used NinjaTrader for all my charting. I have this love/hate thing with Ninja. The charting is pretty good, I like the drawing tools. But I end up with too many windows on my desktop and also it seems I have to click several times to get at stuff. Hotkeys should help with that.
I took a look at QuoteTrader but to be honest the ads are annoying as heck and I just didn't get into it. A trading application is serious and ads are distracting.
Same for QuoteTracker. I would have liked to evaluate it but it doesn't work with OpenTick or Yahoo. Since IB is down and MB doesn't have backfill, I'm out of luck for using QT on the weekend.
I also find the interface of QT very cluttered. They "maximize" screen space at the expense of cluttering it up.
So now I come back to NinjaTrader, the only one that will work on the weekend for me. $1000k is a lot more than the others, but I'm still thinking it's nice to have everything in one single application: backtesting, trading, etc.
One new criteria I have is to do alerts. I want to set an alert for example "when a stock makes a higher high on above average volume". I couldn't figure out how to do it with QT. I could do price or volume but not both. I'm now looking at how to do it with NinjaTrader. I want to do my scans on the weekend and set up alerts and then during the week I'll be alerted when a setup is met and a trigger fires. Seems simple doesn't it?
If anyone has more advice or recommendations based on the above, please let me know.