Unfortunately, I find myself at the same place as others in this thread. That is, ready to throw in the towel on NT8 until the platform undergoes a thorough debugging and becomes stable -- as in does not hang, crash, or screw up the data bars, no matter what.
My feedback is based on comparison to 2 other broker platforms that rarely give me grief, and whose behavior have been highly predictable and trustworthy for years. Although they do not have the slick chart-trading functionality and theoretical speed of a fully compiled language like C#, in the day trading business stability is valued over nice-to-have features.
Within a span of just 3 months of running NT8 on an I7 trading computer with SSD (i.e. lightning fast), I have experienced:
- Unhandled internal SharpDX errors that pop a dialog but cannot continue even after the Continue button is pressed. I do not use any calls to the rendering engine in my limited indicator code... these are NT8 internal errors.
- Charts that freeze without warning. Menus continue to work, but chart cannot be manipulated using the mouse and bars/indicators stop updating. NT8 then refuses to quit from the Control Panel, and a kill task is required.
- Incorrect tick data bars plotting on charts, which can be corrected momentarily by reloading all historical data... but immediately resume inserting extra bars that distort indicators and do not resemble the identical charts on my other platforms. This has occurred for a period of hours on two separate days out of the last 4 trading days! Tick count on the bars is > 500, so no excuse.
- Problems with the Continuum data service -- slow or no login issues repeatedly over the past week.
- A number of bugs resulting from programatically correct use of native NT8 methods or properties. I have reported several via this forum.
- Frequent hanging of the entire NT8 platform when a simple save workspace menu option is selected.
- The fact that NT8 runs as a single process on a trading machine that offers 8 processor cores to increase efficiency and help separate hung processes from those that could continue on a separate core/thread.
- Goofy design ideas like (to name a few): Sharing the same chart trader with every tab in the same window (what if each chart uses different accounts or order types?), lack of right click menus to quickly set properties like color or weight on drawing objects, having to press Alt-Enter to add multi-line text to charts, and no parent workspace window to hold all the individual charts and other visual objects that need to exist in the same view (in addition to no easy way to save the workspace / view repeatedly during the day as annotations are made on charts).
Today was the last straw. Missed a 6 pt move in ES because NT8 hit me with the first 3 bullets in my above list, all within the first hour of trading.
So NT support, kindly let us know when NT is on version 9 or 10. Might have another look then.
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