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Surely the most obvious choice is Sierra Chart? For the standard price of $36 per month(Service Package 5) you can do basically everything you can in MD. If you have some additional requirements then you could code them yourself in ACSIL( C++) or pay a dev to do it- Based on the cost savings per month you should have additional funds spare that could be spent on customization.
"Free markets work because they allow people to be lucky, thanks to aggressive trial and error, not by giving rewards or incentives for skill. The strategy is, then, to tinker as much as possible and try to collect as many Black Swan opportunities as you can"
I would tend to agree with you. Linnsoft has an agreement with MD not to sell the footprint but they are the developer of this product. Now we have a third party who is offering the equivalent or similar product for the footprint part only at a small cost. You're now dealing with two entities. One of them can let you down at any time without prior notice and for any reason as we have seen with MD and Ninja. I think Sierra chart is the best deal for a volume and TPO profile trader.
I venture to disagree, and I don't want to get into a platform debate here as everyone should do whatever they feel is best for their trading business. And I use many platforms myself as it is as each one have their own strengths and I don't want be dogmatic (I use Tradestation, Ninja, TOS, etc. - I love all of them and couldn't do my work without them).
I've been evaluating some platforms to jump from MD after the announcement for VP and Footprint (which are not many at least that I could find).
In my 'humble' opinion, if you are a Volume/Market profile trader nothing comes close to IRT or MD. I love the footprint from MD, but now there is no other option if you want to continue to use IRT like platform with footprint than use the combination of the two (IRT + deltaprint). Unless MD decide to offer footprint as a third party, which doesn't seem likely (as probably there was a financial transaction involved in their move to CQG).
I'm still evaluating the combination (as I have signals coded into the footprint chart and other coded indicators that I need to transfer over). It seems that everything should work but will have more info in few days as I have more time to test the code and features I use.
If cost is your main driver, yes there are other options out there.
I don't want to get into a debate, however, out of curiosity, what is it that you can do with the MD footprint that you can't do with an adaptation from Sierra charts numbers bars & volume profile study? Maybe there's some secret sauce I don't know about.
"Free markets work because they allow people to be lucky, thanks to aggressive trial and error, not by giving rewards or incentives for skill. The strategy is, then, to tinker as much as possible and try to collect as many Black Swan opportunities as you can"
With an adaptation you may be able to do a lot of things, but the question is, how hard is this adaptation to produce in another platform and in the end are you going to have a similar result? I’ve transferred very complex code between platforms (Tradestation and Ninja, MD and Tradestation, etc), but I use every platform for its strength. I prefer to use Tradestation to analyze stocks, and chart drawing in general. I love Ninja because it uses C# and it’s excellent to build and test strategies with all the MSFT libraries available, etc. A lot has to do with look and feel also for the task at hand (I can do VP at Tradestation, but it’s a very rudimentary chart). This is in a macro level, there is a lot of micro differences that I don’t have time to describe here as it would turn this post into a multi-page paper.
One thing that comes to mind that I use very often on my footprint charts in MD is that I have around 20 buttons on my charts that allows me to quickly view a chart in different periodicity. I can flip from a Renko chart (2tick Re, 4tick Re, etc) to a P&F, to a range (1r, 1.5r, 3r), to a 1 min, 5 min, 30min, 5500 volume, 2000t all in just a click of a button! I can also click a button to turn some of my indicators and signals on/off. I also have some statistics for the footprint and specific indicators. Can Sierra do some of this? Of course, but not with the same flexibility and amount of options. Could I code/adapt all this in another platform? I think I could. Is it worth my effort and will I get the same result, probably not, unless I spend a lot of effort (and I can code quite well in all platforms above). This is just one small example, there are many others that expand to the entire MD platform and why I pay for it monthly.
Again, as I said in my previous post, everyone should do what they think is a good fit for them.
I believe their motivation was access to a large and well capitalized development team (CQG) that could work and improve their product for the years to come. Maybe the migration could have been handled differently and/or in a different manner, but sometimes these things move so fast it's hard to be "smooth".
Trevor, the owner of MD, who I have known for many years has always been committed to helping his customers.
He did create one of the better (in my opinion) display of Volume Profile.
There are alternatives such as SC, IRT, etc. However, I think that the current product as add serious features that did not exit before to MD Trader, such as having the ability to have extensive execution capabilities.
Thank you,
Matt Z
Optimus Futures
There is a substantial risk of loss in futures trading. Past performance is not indicative of future results.
Trading futures and options involves substantial risk of loss and is not suitable for all investors. Past performance is not necessarily indicative of future results. You may lose more than your initial investment. All posts are opinions and do not claim to be facts. Please conduct your own due diligence. Use only Risk capital when trading Futures.
1 800 771 6748 local 561 367 8686 email [email protected]
Since I am the other entity, I think I can answer this
The reason I set this up is because I am a long time MD subscriber and under no circumstance would prefer to transfer to the CQG platform. I have tested the new MD CQG platform and did not like it ( personal preference of course ).
On IRT I can use all my MD definitions, except the footprint style, which is now solved with the DeltaPrint.
I have had many calls with dr. Linn from Linnsoft ( IRT ) and there is no reason at all to deviate from the path we are on.
That said, we even strive to go beyond the, pretty simple, footprint as we keep developing this and will ask for the traders opinion shortly in adding more features where MD was never really open to do so.
You can use Rithmic and IRT. You can use it for the unfiltered data capabilities and use R Trader as your execution platform.
In my opinion, R Trader gives you one of the better order audits for tracing your orders throughout the day.
You can see what was sent to the exchange, rejected, cancelled and the time submitted. You can choose any of the trading days in the past and go over the orders as well. Also, it has the Server Side OCO.
I hope this helps.
Thank you,
Matt Z
Optimus Futures
There is a substantial risk of loss in futures trading. Past performance is not indicative of future results.
Trading futures and options involves substantial risk of loss and is not suitable for all investors. Past performance is not necessarily indicative of future results. You may lose more than your initial investment. All posts are opinions and do not claim to be facts. Please conduct your own due diligence. Use only Risk capital when trading Futures.
1 800 771 6748 local 561 367 8686 email [email protected]
I've used Investor/RT and Rithmic for years with no issues...I would definitely recommend it.
I also keep Rithmic's R Trader open on my computer as backup, just in case, but all order execution is done in I/RT.
Also, Investor/RT did "support" CQG data at one point, but users would need to run MD Trader as the "data source" (so you would have Investor/RT and MD Trader running at the same time). Going forward from what I understand, Linnsoft plans on offering users direct access to CQG data.
If you can keep your wits about you while all others are losing theirs, and blaming you....The world will be yours and everything in it, what's more, you'll be a man, my son. - Kipling