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Well, the trader for whom I do occasional coding switched from
TS2000i to NinjaTrader. He said it's much faster for charting
and real-time updating than TS ever was.
However, his use of NinjaTrader consists of looking at charts and
manually placing markers and trendlines, and he trades manually too
using his own dedicated direct link to his broker. He doesn't do
backtesting (never needed to, he has a knack for seeing what works,
and I can't argue with his success), and doesn't write code, but
he's full of ideas he wants to test. That's where I'm supposed to
come in.
So I figured I'd better have a look at NinjaTrader.
To my surprise, it's feature-rich and free. The only feature
disabled in the free version seems to be the ability to place
real-life orders through it. For strategy development and
backtesting, the free version is all you need.
I wish other software providers would follow that marketing model.
I think the free-for-testing version is a great thing, because it
gives you an unlimited time to learn how to use it.
And you'll NEED that time. What a steep learning curve it is!
The documentation is thorough and extensive; clearly much effort was
put into making it easy to follow and understand. But NinjaScript
sure isn't EasyLanguage. It's not bad (it's C# based), and
the editor tries to hide bookkeeping code from you so you can
concentrate on the good stuff. However, the bookkeeping code is
important if you don't want to use the Wizard to write indicators.
And I *dislike* the indicator Wizard. The way I write indicators,
I'm constantly adding or changing the number and type of input
parameters. Ninja doesn't like that. Once the Wizard has built
the template source code for you to flesh out, things like input
parameters have a number of dependencies that result in compile
errors if you touch them. Maybe I'm missing something, but
I haven't seen an easy way to redesign the front end (input
parameters) of indicator, once written, without going through the
bookkeeping code which is sometimes hard to comprehend.
I'd much prefer to write my indicators without the help of a Wizard,
but I haven't learned how yet (and I don't know if it's practical).
One thing I miss from the EasyLanguage editor is the ability to
right-click on any function name and open a window to view the code.
With NinjaTrader, I have to find the console window on my cluttered
desktop, pull down a menu to edit an indicator, find the indicator,
and load it. I wish I could just do that from the current editor
window: Right-click on name, Edit, done.
Anyway, that's my experience from spending a few hours with it last
night. I can see that I'll eventually migrate all my TS2000i stuff
to NinjaTrader -- and I believe there's a TS->Ninja translator
available somewhere.
--
,|___ Alex Matulich -- alex@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
// +__> Director of Research and Development
// \ Unicorn Research Corporation -- http://unicorn.us.com
// __) HTML FORMATTED MAIL SENT HERE WILL BE REJECTED AS SPAM.
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