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)
Hi, I just wanted to add here, that trading futures when market crashes arrive is something very different than at other times. You may have various problems with all brokers. Liquidity dries up in those environments, which can cause the market to move much, much bigger than normal. If you have level 2 data, and you look at the DOM, you can see the total liquidity day to day, and that can allow you to see if you are trading a very, very below average liquidity market. Markets like this, most likely, can have margin increases mid day. The market can be shut down mid day, which is not your brokers fault. Slippage on trade entries and exits will be extremely high. This is also not your brokers fault. These types of markets are a nightmare if you are trying to trade a trading system and have consistent size wins and losses. Most people out there are just thinking how they can make a bunch of money, when, from my opinion, they should more be thinking about consistency of running a trading plan over time.
During market crashes is a totally different thing for brokers in general. During market crashes, liquidity dries up. This has nothing to do with one's broker. With no liquidity, the market moves much faster than normal. This creates tremendous risk for the broker, who now has many traders going broke on their platform. Margins might very well change quickly in that environment. Slippage will be very bad in those environments. You can see total liquidity of markets in the DOM if you have level 2 data. I usually look at the ES and see if it has fairly average liquidity day to day. Liquidity levels have nothing to do with your broker. Markets can also shut down in those environments, which is also not done by your broker.
OK, well most traders would not entertain these suggestions. Most traders are sitting at their home offices, and thus a potentially huge amount of congesting Wide Area Network (WAN) traffic needs to flow from the market data source and exchange, to the trader's desk.
Firstly, traders are always "looking around" for the next instrument that might be more profitable, and often fail to specialize. Because they are considering, and are ready to trade, a range of instruments, that data has to travel to their desk.
Efficiency requires specialization, and that requires cutting down drastically on the number of market data feed elements needed to be watched/processed.
Most traders are looking for "high end" workstations to "crunch" all that data and manage many displays; and tend to neglect the WAN and ISP network facilities which are required to manage peak loading. How many times do you hear traders talk about "lag" ??? When "lag" is humanly perceivable; it's already huge.
If you are such a trader, and using NinjaTrader as your platform, you'll be running Windows, and you'll want to optimize your WAN networking as much as possible. This involves replacing the "stock" "congestion provider" (maybe it's CUBIC) for your Internet TCP with a much better one, currently named "CTCP" which handles WAN congestion more efficiently, thus improving overall throughput. (You can look up how to do that). Basically you want to tune your system as a Internet Gamer would want to do it, and there are guides for that.
But the key in our approach is to "Co-locate" the actual Dedicated Server and platform, NT8 NinjaTrader as physically close to the exchange as possible. This means for Futures traders, locating in Chicago or, at even higher cost, in Aurora itself so that your machine is very close to the data sources, and the orders portals if at all possible.
Choosing some degree of effective colocation means that the trading platform is very near, in network latencies, to the exchanges.
The role of your home office desktop thus becomes a "remote display" for all that is happening on your dedicated server. I say dedicated, because a cheaper virtual private server (aka VPS) is generally not good enough nor reliable enough.
A powerful data center server can be had for $150-$200 per month, on a self-managed basis. This could mean you'll need to learn how to be admin for your server, plus potentially creating 1 or 2 "virtual machines" in that same box; each of which could itself run an instance of NT8 NinjaTrader or your preferred platform; at no additional monthly cost. In my case, I get 3 "machines" for the price of one; since my monthly fee includes a license for 2 Hyper V VM instances as well.... very handy once you know how it works.
BUT LET'S FACE FACTS that very very few traders will choose this route, even if they understand potential advantages. They just don't have the specialist "mindset" to "take the plunge" into the world of very powerful datacenter based servers rather than the usual concept of "powerful desktop pc".
In my case, software on the server can take decisions when it "sees" a trigger opportunity; with a very short latency. That's gonna involve software features beyond the scope of this discussion; but obviously your latencies and the volumes of data you can process greatly increase when you choose to use a dedicated server.
To be open and clear, all my troubles came from running automated trading and doing back testing and optimization of strategies while at the same time discretionary trading. I built a purpose trading PC with 16 cores and 64 Gigs of ram and all the latest bells and whistles last year as well. . So the PC is rock solid. The problems are with the Multicharts 64 not utilizing system resources properly and having numerous random memory leaks and platform stuck charts and crushes. It is a lot to ask of a platform to be able to run algo optimizations and multiple charts and workspaces in a live trading environment. I know. But I can do it in MT4 or MT5, never had problems with the Tradestation years ago and Multicharts older versions. It seems like the last few major updates have gone down the instability route. And Did it ever for me. A friend of mine has the same problems trading with Multicharts 64 and Interactive Brokers and he limits the open charts to 1 and workspaces to 1! and only one algo and still gets his charts randomly stuck some times. So I am not alone in this. One of the solutions Multicharts offered is to buy an extra licence limited to back testing and optimization and to run it on a different PC. I think they offered a substantial discount for such a licence, around $600-$800 bucks to buy it I think.
I decided to exit instead. Ninja Trader is way better in my mind anyways.
One of the add ons is causing an issue I'm just not sure which one and haven't figured it out as yet and is an ongoing issue which only began on NT8.0.27.1
It's not causing to much trouble as it only freezes a chart in the workspace and a save & restart of the workspace resolves the issue but it is still there and has to be dealt with which is not ideal
Thanks for your opinion and concern, something we all need to keep in mind
In my case I run a tight ship and always have. I'm still looking to trade the same position sizes I'm just attempting to minimize funds sitting in my account solely for the purpose of intra-day trading where they could be used for other things, where the funds can still be drawn upon in the events in which you describe in your posts I have no intention of bankrupting myself but I guess most to do don't.