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There are free versions of NinjaTrader, as someone else posted, you can use it with your various brokers such as Interactive Brokers for your analysis, for as long as you want.
Here is a comparison table of the various versions of NinjaTrader, along with their price (free and paid) and associated features.
Disclosure: This communication is sent to you by NinjaTrader, LLC, a software development company which owns and supports all proprietary technology relating to and including the NinjaTrader trading platform.
Maybe NinjaTrader is the best but the List of available Brokers is the Problem .(FXCM!...IB!...)
However NinjaTrader is talking FIX API and I saw posts mentioning that they found out how to connect NinjaTrader over FIX API with a Broker not on the List . If they could make this public and implement this into the NinjaTrader that would be great. Because I like to get paid for my trades with the help of https://www.paybackfx.com/ and someone else.
Looks like it comes down to either Sierra or NinjaTrader. My recommendation is for NInja. Simple and reliable. Sierra is good but complicated to use in comparison to Ninja.
Now the good news is you can test them both on a demo account. Your best bet would be to try them both and see which one suits you best.
I think this is the best advice: use something before you decide -- there will always be a free demo available, complete with data.
The fact is that most platforms are "good enough," and it probably will come down to your personal preference after using them.
I have used NinjaTrader extensively, and moved to Sierra Chart and like it much, much better. It basically runs rings around NT, especially NT8 (I think so, anyway), and is cheap to free (depending on the deals your broker may or may not offer.) However, it is damned hard to figure out how to use -- the interface and the web-based "help" both have a pretty steep learning curve. Once you get used to it, as with most things, it's fine. Just be aware that you may have to work at it, at first.
With that said, a lot of people like Ninja, and it is a perfectly good platform.
The best bet is to try any platforms that appeal to you, give them time enough for you to get familiar with them, and go from there.
(From reading comments on this forum over time, it is fairly common to find someone going from NT to SC, fairly uncommon for someone who knows both to go from SC to NT. But I'm showing my own preference here. You should try several, if you can.)
"best" is a term many beginners use because they do think that "best" exists. It does not.
Often they want to narrow their choices to what others do, when in fact they have a lot more choices and selections.
You have Gain Trader which is free and has charts, quotes, and an API that connects to multiple platforms with the same credentials. There is Multicharts which has amazing charts and suitable for larger screens, and it has great backtesting
capabilities for programmers. If you like Web-based, you will like TT and it comes with iPhone and Android Apps. If you like order flow, you also have Bookmap.
There is a plethora of choices.
In reality, long term traders use (being generous) maybe 10% of any given functionalities that a platform may provide. So the key is to dig to what is most important to you. Many of the new traders I talk to, do not know what is important to them. However, we always have questions ready to ask to narrow to what is "best" for them.
Thank you,
Matt Z
Optimus Futures
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Sierra Chart is a great platform. Part of the learning curve is that SC has built-in a ton of options. They have options for just about everything imaginable. The platform comes with a ton of studies and there are easy ways to create/combine your own studies/alerts/auto strategies with the various spreadsheet studies. It is super fast and takes very little memory to run.
There are two ways to program in it:
1. Use the various spreadsheets studies. If you are decent to good wrt to excel, the spreadsheet studies are somewhat easy and they are capable of surprising a lot. I have coded an auto strategy in the Spreadsheet Strategy for Trading. They obviously have limitations.
2. The other way to code is with its ACSIL language/library which is based on C++. I haven't tried this. Not ready to learn yet again another language.
NinjaTrader is a good platform as well. It has a ton of studies and the new NT8 is pretty easy to use. NT8 is pretty resource heavy vs SC and NT8 is more limited with respect to brokers. IMHO, to really take advantage of NT8, you have to learn C#/Ninjascript and the library.
So, if you are an intermediate to advanced Excel user, I would go with SC at least in the short term. If you are ready to tackle C#/Ninjascript, I would go with NT8. Without knowing C#, you really don't know what the wizard is cooking up behind the curtain.
If you demo SC and you are finding a steep learning curve, just remember, there is probably an option for however you are wanting the platform to perform/look and feel. There are Global Settings that apply to most options including chart colors and styles. There are several places to uncheck the Global Settings on a specific window so that you can customize a specific chart/window.