Trading Platforms Pros and Cons - What is your favorite trading platform

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bradypreston

Lets make a list of all the trading platforms and review them to find top ranked platforms. Please do not post on here if you are going to go off topic.

Please if you have any experience with these programs please share your experience

Tradestation
Ami Broker
Trade Blox
Trade Navigator
Traders Studio
Wealth Lab
Metastock

I have some experience and own all of these except Trade Blox.

Out of all of them I us Trader Studio the most because I find it has everything I need in one package. The next one I use the most is Trade Navigator because it is very easy to program in.

I started on metastock and tradestation, but I found that they fell behind on their features. Eg portfolio backtesting
 
I have been using ninja trader to automate some of my trading systems. While programing I found a huge flaw with ninja trader, it wont let you place trades of the open. This means that you can't use the opening bars price in your systems.
 
Apart from this one issue, how have you found NT for autotrading. From the reviews, I got the impression it is not ready for prime time yet, and had resolved to buy OpenQuant.

I own Amibroker & I really really like it. In the right hands it can do virtually everything, and costs next to nothing. The problem is that I've not been able to commit the time to master AFL (the scripting language).

I have just bought TradersStudio, which I think is very powerful, but requires less programming. Also I get the impression that the programming language is much simpler & more intuitive than AFL.

I am actually a programmer by trade. But I don't want to have to learn a new language for every new 'task' I want to do, especially if that language is non-trivial. That is why I found OpenQuant so attractive, as well as NinjaTrader to an extent.
 
I hear very few comments about TradingBlox. Are any of you familiar with that product?

If so, what was your opinion of it?

Thanks

Steve
 
What do you mean by "trading platform"? The ones you list are all much more complicated than what is required for simple trading. I think you must mean backtesting/automated/trading platform. I use IB/Quotetracker/Buttontrader and it works perfectly for daytrading futures.
 
Quote from Bearbelly:

What do you mean by "trading platform"? The ones you list are all much more complicated than what is required for simple trading. I think you must mean backtesting/automated/trading platform. I use IB/Quotetracker/Buttontrader and it works perfectly for daytrading futures.
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What feed do you use for QT?
 
If you want to test or trade an intraday strategy on volume bars or tick count bars, do not go with tradestation. You cannot backtest to the tick and if you have volume bar charts and pointer tracking set to the workspace level, the pointers won't track between the two charts very well at all. It may have to do with the way they time stamp ticks. They are promising to timestamp them differently eventually.

The automated order entry is not satisfactory IMO, if you miss a limit order the strategy will become out of synch with the account and it will shut down. They have some manual workarounds available on the forums for synching up things after that happens but unattended trading requires that you use market orders. As far as I could tell account info is much more complete and easy to get into the strategy using a dll and Interactivebrokers than it is from the Tradestation acount. I never automated a single trade with Tradestation however, not real sure about that.

Programming becomes more complicated when you are backtesting to the tick and if you disable a strategy and reenable it you have to go through and reset some check boxes. I don't know how many times I had bogus backtest results before I learned to dutifully go through and check all the frigging settings. It was more than annoying.... things just don't run at the speed of thought sometimes. Some things in the software are not explained at all in the online help from the software or the Easy language manual or the tutorials, you have to get on the forums and any joker might come in with a bogus answer, it did happen to me. I learned to write test software to answer my own questions eventually. It really slowed the process down. I found that a decision tree implemented with boolean "ands" and "or" logic often did not work the way one would expect, and that, after testing all sorts of systems. That threw the results of all the testing up in the air and I decided that if I was going to have to redo all the work it would be with another platform.

The radarscreen is the best thing Tradestation has going, only TickQuest has a similar program.
 
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