I don't think this topic has been brought up here before.

I've been having a bad few weeks reinventing the wheel with Ninja backtesting and hard-coded ATMs... a process I understand many of you have been through. I'm also a MetaStock guy and their long-awaited update (three years!) is underwhelming and has left me wondering what a small-time guy should do.

So the question to the floor is... is there a real alternative to Ninja for the retail crowd?

I'm looking for;
- ability to create and backtest strategies with tick granularity and solid backtest reporting
- ability to directly access a brokerage and trade automatically
- multi instrument, multi market capability
- access to paid data, historical or real-time, as I see fit, from a variety of vendors
- future-proof, open platform that can access and send signals or data to/from other programs

With 7, Ninja will probably be 90% there for me, but that last 10% is driving me a bit nuts.

Thoughts?

I'm in the same place, Ninja7 is eroding my will to proceed.....
Did this get answered elsewhere or is there simply no alterative?

Stem1 

I'm in the same place, Ninja7 is eroding my will to proceed..... Did this get answered elsewhere or is there simply no alterative?

Has been discussed a few times, just read some threads in the Platforms section (this section).

But a brief list:
- Sierra Chart
- MultiCharts
- Investor RT
- MarketDelta
- ThinkOrSwim

There are of course many others but those are probably the most popular on the forum.

Mike

Wow. Old post.

That last 10% is still driving me nuts, and a few things happened around NT7b18 or b22 late last year that really had me looking for alternatives.

My conclusion is that for retail, there aren't any true alternatives right now (1 March 2011). There are some things I am watching, but I'm trading today and have been through the SDLC enough at work to know I should buy a product, not a product roadmap.

There are some things I've stopped trying to do in Ninja full stop, knowing it is the wrong tool for those particular jobs.

Personally I've focused on making my trade ideas portable, and have been building external tools to support my development process so that Ninja is merely one of my execution platforms... and I should be able to walk away from it if required.

That said, looking up I've got screen full of Ninja on my Chicago VPS and another screen full of Ninja on my Singapore workstation. I've got a bunch of stuff I need to code this week on Ninja, and I look forward to it. It's a love-hate relationship, but I'm not paying thousands a month for it and neither is anyone else. It is what it is.

In the end it is just a tool.

IMHO, YMMV, etc etc

I know this is old thread but it was relevant.

As NinjaTrader doesn't allow to buy multi-broker lifetime license anymore and i am not interested in spending $99 every month for the same, what other alternatives we have which support multi-broker connection. I think MultiChart supports .Net as well as lifetime license and support multi-broker. Anyone else?