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I am currently trading E Minis (Micro E Minis) discretionary and use a different broker. In order to do strategy development and trade automation and after some research I am now at the point where it seems to me that one of the mentioned platforms probably would be the best fit for my purpose. As I have a strong background in .NET development NinjaTrader might be a good fit. On the other hand also TradeStation with EasyLanguage might be a very good choice.
However as I still do discretionary trading on the other account I would like to start "slowly" and do not want to spend huge amounts of license costs for any software from the very beginning.
At the first glance this seems not to be necessary with Ninja (Borman Trading or Philip Capital), however having a second look it seems to be quite expensive to buy or lease the platform for someone who cautiously wants to start out with algorithmic trading. Buying or leasing seems to be necessary in case I want to have the programming and algorithmic live trading possibilities. Am I right?
How about TradeStation? It appears to me that the costs per round turn with 1.50$ per side for E Minis (0.50$ per side for Micro E Mini) seems to be mentionably higher as they are with Ninja.
If I am right also the data feed which is needed for realtime data for these Futures is about 40$ which is not cheap in comparison to Ninja.
I am graceful for any experience, thoughts, suggestions and experience you have for me. Also please feel free to correct me if I am wrong please.
Tradestation's Easylanguage is super convenient and productive for prototyping systems. NinjaTrader has better capability building custom tools and advanced stuff. Both platforms have their issues. A lot of the stuff I have developed and am developing for my algorithmic discretionary trading is NinjaTrader 8 and would not be easy to develop in Tradestation.
As well, I also have a strong background in C# but still find Easylanguage more productive for prototyping. However, I have started to shift over more to NinjaTrader 8 because of the ability to do custom stuff. It is very powerful platform. I do still use both fairly extensively.
Perhaps not what you want to hear but the most productive bet might be to prototype your systems initially in Tradestation and then deploy them to Ninja.
Basic version is free. You can get help to set it up correctly if you buy a small course at https://robotwealth.com/ The author Kris is a big fan of it.
Thanks a lot @tpredictor for sharing your experience and approach. At the moment I got 2 requests open at brokers regarding the two platforms with specific questions about the pricing. Depending on the responses I might decide to give a go to TradeStation at the beginning if it comes along with lower initial costs. Later on, if the automated approaches work out for me quite well step by step I might consider to go for Ninja in addition - as you seem to do - or go for Ninja completely. All depends on my experiences I make.
Again: thanks for sharing!
@trendisyourfriend: Thank you for that link. I did not come across that possibility yet and will have a look at it and the details, too.
