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I'm thinking of changing to Ninja-Trader charting. I don't particularly want to link it to my broker (Interactive Brokers) Which Ninja package do most people use and what is the best data feed provider for day trading activities ?
Can you help answer these questions from other members on NexusFi?
We officially support eSignal, IQFeed and Kinetick for market data service only providers. Kinetick is our own and brand and the preferred feed. Its based on technology from IQFeed, they are our partner in Kinetick.
If you're thinking of switching to anything, Sierra should be your first consideration. It's less expensive, more robust, and has greater support. Also if you combine SC/Rithmic and Optimus futures you'll have a great data feed w/ accurate backfill. Sierra also offers some market internals w/ a ~1sec update interval.
This is my personal experience with data feeds for NT listed from best to worst. Keep in mind these are only services I have personally tried:
CQG was the best. Fast, reliable and tons of historical data. Free with an open account.
Zen-fire with Mirus futures was next. Did not seem to have the historical data of CQG but fast and reliable. Free with an open account.
Kinetic was adequate but overpriced. Lacked the speed, reliability and historical data of the aforementioned two.
MB trading's in house data you have to pay for and was unreliable. ( I had bad ticks in historical and live trading)
Esignal, in my opinion was junk. Way over priced , unreliable data with bad ticks, limited historical data.
It seems that the free data from brokerage firms is the most reliable and consistent. The irony is it is free with an open account. The benefit is you can back test your strategy against all instruments and evaluate it's robustness and potential.
Trading: The one I'm creating in the present....Index Futures mini/micro, ZF
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I use NinjaTrader with Kinetick and Zen-Fire. I feel kinetick is a must have for all the market generated data that comes with the standard package. I recently switched brokers away from IB their data is real bad. The DOM, now with Zen-Fire, updates crazy fast compared to IB's data. I also use Rancho Dinero.
As far a charts packages go NinjaTrader has the most flexibility hands down. But this means that to be able to do some of the stuff you want (the understood you not you personally) to do you are going to have to know C# or learn it or hire someone to do it for you. But the good part is just read the help file, get a C# book from the library and or take a course on C#. And with a little time and hard work you too can twist Ninja into anything you want.
People are quick to say this or that charting package is more robust and or better but the simple fact remains... NinjaTrader uses C# not a proprietary language. This means it has a very very rich library of methods available to it from the programming world in general not something just created for a charting application. In addition to all of this all of NinjaTraders indicators run native not interpreted which means it achieves the highest performance possible ie it is super fast. For example I run 4 workspaces, about approx 30 charts everything from yearly to a 233 tick on YM. All in all about 40 diff data series from TICK to VIX to 6J ES NQ to AAPLVIX etc etc . Granted I run a Falcon F-37X bought on 9/14/2011 ( Trading Computer ) but I think you get the idea.... CPU runs on average between 4 and 10% all day with outliers at 2 and 14% depending on the day.
The bottom line: Ninja is whatever you want it to be.
Wow interesting. IQFeed (what Kinetick is OEM'd from) has more historical data than any of the guys you listed, and in my years of using it I think it has been down maybe once for a few minutes, while all you need to do is search on the forum and find that the others you mentioned are down routinely.
But important thing is to find one that works for you! I know most people are unwilling to pay $100 a month for data. Everyone has their own way of trading...