How to evaluate the accuracy of your sim trading results on different platforms?
I have been trading a placing orders in Tradestation and Ninja (Using zenfire).
They act very differently. Orders in Tradestation have partial fills and seem to get filled quicker. I rarely see partial fills in Ninja, and filling or orders seem to take much longer. (partial fills are being elected in sim). Which platform does a better job of creating reality? I understand the psychological part that always confounds results. In some of the threads people have talked about being successful in sim and then trying same strategy with a live account. How much is the program simulation a factor?

Titian 

How to evaluate the accuracy of your sim trading results on different platforms? I have been trading a placing orders in Tradestation and Ninja (Using zenfire). They act very differently. Orders in Tradestation have partial fills and seem to get filled quicker. I rarely see partial fills in Ninja, and filling or orders seem to take much longer. (partial fills are being elected in sim). Which platform does a better job of creating reality? I understand the psychological part that always confounds results. In some of the threads people have talked about being successful in sim and then trying same strategy with a live account. How much is the program simulation a factor?

https://forum.ninjatrader.com/showthread.php?t=47437

NinjaTrader Version 7


https://www.tradestation.com/trading-technology/tradestation-platform/execute/simulator


https://www.sierrachart.com/index.php?l=doc/doc_TradeSimulation.php

Be careful with TS simulator. Totally unrealistic. I'm tired of meeting traders that do well on TS Sim just to go live and lose money. A problem that I believe TS is aware of, but has been no desire to solve. This problem is known for years!

The problem? "one big weakness with either back testing in [COLOR=#0066cc]tradestation[/COLOR] or using the [COLOR=#0066cc]tradestation[/COLOR] simulator is that with limit orders - if the price is hit you get a fill which is far from the reality in real-time, real-money trading."

Google the sentence in quotes to find a discussion about this in another forum, I didn't want to link here to another forum...

NT will be more realistic, mainly if you are SIM ES.

I know that this thread was open a long time ago, but I just thought I'd add my bit with regard to NinjaTrader7. I don't know if this error is still there with NT8. Anyway, I was using NT7 to buy on limit using calculated indicators. To my horror these limits were NOT adhered to in real life which became an issue when dealing with small average profits. The problem seemed to occur when the indicator was not exactly at the level of a pip. By example, lets assume there was a pip size of 0.1. If my indicator were at 100.16 and this was the calculated limit that I was buying at, then NT7 would raise the limit to 100.2 rather than using 100.1 which it should have done. I added code to cope with this error, but I was still horrified that an error of this scale existed in a well-established platform. When trading a contract such as the ES, this error in the code became like a tax on every trade.