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)
yep, necessity indeed... I was hoping to stop using tradestation next year.. which is why the free ninja was good for wife's charting given OANDA is her order entry... I see the appeal of NT7 for free, just sucks that is so unstable..
Can you help answer these questions from other members on NexusFi?
I used NT7 during it's beta and it sucked so bad I quit NT for a while. I lost all of my indicators and it crashed a lot.
So in the end I am going to stay with 6.5 for a while.
It is impossible to lose indicators, unless they are compiled assemblies. Compiled assemblies may have to be reinstalled. If you are talking about NT 6.5 indicators, they need to be adapted for use with NT 7.0.
I just don't get it. I hear all this stuff about "Ninja's a piece of crap" "keeps crashing all the time" "freezes and hangs up".
I've been running NT7.0 Beta 22 for over 2 months now - TRADING LIVE without one problem.
I just don't get it.
But, of course, I'm running it on a MAC! And I don't have 6 monitors with 20 charts up while running backtests on another 30 or 40 instruments. A VW Bug is NOT going to pull an 18 wheeler no matter how much you want it to.
That might be why I've had no freezes, crashes, hang-ups or lost 'anything'. One slow chart, one fast chart. One instrument (6E). That's all I need.
It's up 24 / 5. I backup & shutdown at 5:30 on Fridays & restart & relaunch VMWare Fusion, Windows XP and Ninja 7.0 on Sunday around 4:30, reconnect & let it go until I'm ready to trade Monday morning.
There's been so much negativity about Ninja recently, I thought it time to make a positive post.
I think it's grand! (and so much faster at loading and running than 6.5 ever was).
After all, it's what you learn AFTER you know it all, that counts!
There are people who trade a Portfolio of instruments for different reasons and having 10 or more charts opened at the same time is nothing exceptional. I know many Forex traders who are at ease with handling that many charts and even more. The question is honest, can Ninjatrader deal with many charts and many strategies running in parallel ? Let's just compare it to Metatrader (considered as a dinosaur) which can deal with that many charts and starts in a blink of an eye. Of course, it may not be as sophisticated as Ninja but what it does, it does it very well.
The problem i see with these softwares full of unnecessary features is that they are not flexible. In my opinion, the most logical approach to build sotware in this age to make money is to create an empty shell where the user could select the features HE needs in a plug and play style. Just look at Microsoft word, how many features do you use in your day to day activities ? Do you need mail merge capability ? Do you need to use templates ? Do you need...etc. the list is long but i am sure you'll get the idea. For example with Ninja i do not use the scripting environment, i do not use hot keys, i do not use the dom, i do not use the ATM etc. But i'd like the software to be able to do some elementary pattern recognition, drawing channels or trendlines which is the most basic tool a trader uses almost every day. Look at what we have, a software that tries to do everything but nothing very well. As i wrote a plug and play architecture is the way to go. Let the user decide what he needs and don't impose features i do not need and do not want to pay for.
By chosing a plug-and-play architecture you would attract many developers more easily and speed the development as you can't imagine.
NT 7.0 is very stable, I virtually had no crashessince August(exception: 1 crash, when toggling between instruments on multi-dataseries charts and 1 crash that I produced on purpose by applying an indicator with 580 DataSeries to a 1 min chart with a lookback period of 1 year, which exceeded the available RAM of my PC )
These are my little problems I had during the last 3 months:
(1) Session templates with multiple sessions: not all sessions displayed on rollover date -> bug was fixed
(2) Downloading data for CL from IB (special case): data throttling, when rollover day is Monday -> enter Saturday as the rollover day
(3) False contract months, rollover dates, false offsets stored on NT servers -> can be corrected manually
(4) GetSessionBar(), GetSessionDate(), PriorOHLC() flawed -> bug was fixed
(5) Volume spikes for realtime data upon connection to IB -> carry over from NT 6.5., problem that affects all NT versions, solution: reconnect until the volume is displayed correctly
(6) Daily data from IB not loaded correctly -> use free Kinetick EOD data instead, first-connect Kinetick EOD, second-connect IB
(7) Indicator showing false values, if used on DataSeries with periods were the values have not been set -> need to use indicators in MaximumBarsLookBack.Infinite mode
(8) Crash on installation of new release -> try several times, rename folder Own Documents -> NinjaTrader 7
(9) Stochastics indicator could not be exported -> bug was fixed
(10) When uninstalling one of two assemblies, indicator files had to be removed that accessed the other assembly -> bug was fixed
(11) Accessing indicators with asynchronous loading of daily data not working -> no solution, need to recode the indicator to use synchronous loading of data series
(12) Current version TWS 906.8 downloadable from NT website will be desupported in 3 days: IB changed its API in July, NT developpers only discovered in December that it is incompatible with NT, LOL. Only affects customers running multiple accounts through IB, so no problem for me.
(13) NinjaTrader DOM displays false P&L (1 or 2 ticks off) for TF: no solution so far
Conclusion
No serious bugs, just a few little annoyances. The platform is rock-solid, with some reserves on multi-series charts.
In my experience NT7 is very stable now. I have been running it exclusively for the past 2 months with 6+ charts running automated strategies with no problems whatsoever.
As always, don't be tempted to run back testing or optimise strategies on the same PC when trading - that will eventually lead to a crash.