Long time TS user here....besides the cost the reduction (significant as I do not trade through TS but have a subscriber account)...can an expererienced convert give me their assesment as to the benefits of switching to over MC...stability?...more flexible...speed etc...is the recent addition of subsecond charts in TS an equalizer?

Thanks in advance

9baller

I was a former TS user. Easylanguage compatible which is great. Very stable, haven't crashed doing live trading, also stable for auto trading. Very good tech support. Overall good product.

Hi Trey -

What made you leave TS for MC?

@kevinkdog

MC has a bunch of advantages,not being tied to TS as my brokerage is huge. Which was sub par execution and high cost IMHO. You can also be connected to multiple brokerages as once, so live trading at 1 broker and demo trading at another without having to turn your platform into SIM mode for everything. But I as also searching for easy language compatibility because i didn't want to learn C#. Migrating my stuff from TS to MC was pretty quick, sometimes I would have to change 1 or 2 lines but a vast majority of the time it took it right away. It now has volume profile and market delta type tools but they haven't implemented easy language code for it. I think they have the .NET languages up and running with that at the moment.

The way MC handles data was the largest reason. MC handles data from any commercial data stream out there and dozens of brokerages. Instead of relying on TS data which is filtered aggregate data, you can use DTN IQ feed which is unfiltered. Universal DDE format means you can take any CSV and turn it into a price series. So you can make your own synthetic data, or download data from databanks and use that. This is handled by the quote manager which lets you create your own continuous contracts, ratio back adjusted, point back adjusted, or split. Also lets you specifically specify roll conditions, either a date, or volume (I prefer this one, as it moves when everyone else does). For back testing it has bar inside bar testing just like TS, but takes it one step further. If you have a data provider that can provide bid/ask data, then you can use the bid/ask data series for even more realistic fills. This makes stop and limit order back testing much more viable than with TS. Also it has tick ID, so when you replay or backtest and use some data series that you have tick data for it will use the ticks in the EXACT order they were recorded in. This is better than micro second resolution which i believe Ninja uses.

MCs biggest disadvantage is its walk forward optimizer. I think when TS got grail it then had a great one. So much analysis like cluster and easy to read output charts were great. MC just gives you a spreadsheet with the results. That's pretty lame. It does the job as far as I can tell. I was not an user of WFO until i saw your webinars. So maybe I am not an expert at that area but I think its lacking. Also I don't think its as pretty as TS but much prettier than Ninja. The DOM doesn't have volume levels which would be nice. Performance report does not give out efficiency or RINA index, because RINA is associated with TS. I missed those stats at first. But it does save the performance reports as excel instead of HTML which is better.