Welcome to NexusFi: the best trading community on the planet, with over 150,000 members Sign Up Now for Free
Genuine reviews from real traders, not fake reviews from stealth vendors
Quality education from leading professional traders
We are a friendly, helpful, and positive community
We do not tolerate rude behavior, trolling, or vendors advertising in posts
We are here to help, just let us know what you need
You'll need to register in order to view the content of the threads and start contributing to our community. It's free for basic access, or support us by becoming an Elite Member -- see if you qualify for a discount below.
-- Big Mike, Site Administrator
(If you already have an account, login at the top of the page)
Multicharts is looking like a good all-around fit for me if someone can vouch for the EasyLanguage Extension SDK. Also does anybody know if a metastrategy can be employed somehow in multicharts? But of course this is all assuming their chart trading is decent in version 7. How is MCs support?
I still like Neoticker. It seems fast, stable, customizable, and to have a solid development environment. Does anybody have any experience creating DLLs for NeoTicker?
NinjaTrader is out because of the stability issues.
OpenQuant is probably out for now. I still think it would be the best for developing and automating strategies, but the lack of anything for discretionary trading makes me think I will try some other demos first and consider this an option if developing for other platforms is not satisfactory.
RightEdge looks pretty solid, but I haven't had much time to look into it.
Can you help answer these questions from other members on NexusFi?
Can only speak for what I've seen and I can't say much because it's not public, but lets just say I was impressed with their DOM and chart trader.
As for support, I can recall just two issues I had with the product, in both cases I received a hotfix patch via email within a couple days that solved the issue, and then the next final dot release of the product included the fix as well.
They offer live chat support, and they offer to log in to your machine so they can actually see what is happening, something NinjaTrader would learn a lot from. In my experience, they've got top notch developers. In addition, you can send feedback right from the program itself, and in the event it does crash (happened to me once months ago when I wrote a bad indicator loop), it is a controlled crash (unlike NT which explodes), and it also asks your permission to send the debug logs to MultiCharts to alert them of the problem. Very nice interface, especially when compared to NinjaTrader's "A problem has been detected" approach, which usually then requires a repair/reset database, possible uninstall/reinstall, maybe remove .NET, etc etc. Laughable, if it wasn't so heart wrenchingly depressing. lol!
Anyway. I hope that @aslan will chime in and give you feedback on Neoticker. I hope other MultiCharts users will respond as well, but because the subject of the thread doesn't include MultiCharts there are probably a lot of people not reading it. You might try the "MultiCharts, MultiCharts, MultiCharts" thread for more info on it.
BTW, for those who think I am too hard on NT7, I am just speaking from direct experience. I was a NT fan boy for ever, don't forget. They simply lost my loyalty, and MultiCharts has earned it. I can't predict what the future will bring, but I am very happy with my decision to move to MultiCharts.
Both OpenQuant and MultiCharts have an interesting history.
OpenQuant
Originally developped as R-Quant Data Analysis Studio in C++, it was ported to C# by SmartQuant and then evolved into QuantDevelopper. QuantDevelopper was sold to QuantHouse, a French company and is now offered to institutional clients, while SmartQuant kept the retail version of the product, which is OpenQuant.
SmartQuant is a Russian company with its head-office in St.Petersburg (Leningrad)
MultiCharts
MultiCharts is an off-shoot of TradeStation, probably a Better-TradeStation, allowing to use all the trading systems that are available in Easy Language.
MultiCharts is a Russian company with headquarters in Columbus, Ohio and its development located in Rostov-on-Don.
Going Russian
So if you choose OpenQuant or MultiCharts you are going Russian and probably get better value for money than elsewhere, as there is abundance of well-trained development and support engineers at affordable cost.
It seems to me that Multicharts and RightEdge only allow one strategy to be traded live at a time. Am I right here? How do people deal with this? Do they just code one strategy containing all the sub-strategies?
I'm not sure if this is the case with NeoTicker but thats a huge drawback, at least for what I am looking to do.
The weak point of OpenQuant seems to be its user base. Just had a look at the fora of OpenQuant, Neoticker, NinjaTrader, and Multicharts.
OpenQuant Forum :
18068 posts, 10956 members
5 users online, 0 registered and 5 guests, most users ever online 221 (December 2004) -> looks dead
Neoticker Forum:
38732 posts, 6145 threads, 83352 members - now 6 users online, 6 members and 1 guest
NinjaTrader Forum:
32993 threads, 189782 posts, 23052 members
- now 61 users online, 22 registered and 39 guest, most users ever online 196 (June 2010) -> growing rapidly
MultiCharts Forum:
5076 threads, 28240 posts, 1087 members
- no information given how many users are online
Neoticker has a large user base, but activity is slowing down. OpenQuant was a rising star back in 2004, but seems to be dead. NinjaTrader is growing rapidly - the boys run after the pretty girls, not the bright ones. MultiChart has won a number of awards and is establishing itself as a serious alternative.
Judged by forum activity I would not spend any money on OpenQuant. Also they are not publishing under Trader's Tips in the TASC magazine, which means that they do not have the necessary resources.
These companies publish regularly (> 75%) under Trader's Tips, so they care to maintain and develop their user base:
I thought I had read something in the MC documentation that implied it, but I wasn't sure. RightEdge definitely can't because there is a thread on the forum about running multiple instances of RightEdge to allow multiple strategies to run simultaneously.
OpenQuant does seem like a dead end. Thank you Fat Tails for that data. I'm now down to NeoTicker and MultiCharts, but part of me wants to get a few toolboxes/plugins for Matlab and work from there.