indicator's relationship to strategy code

[otayah]

I'm new to Ninja and I'm about to hire programmers to automate a strategy that will require custom indicators. Could you please help me understand a few things before I decide how to proceed?

1. I'd like to keep a custom indicator hidden from the strategy programmer (I'd have one programmer create the indicators and a different programmer create the strategy code). If you use a custom indicator in a strategy, must the strategy code include all the inner workings of the indicator? Or can you just reference an indicator's name in the strategy code and then the strategy will be able to collect data from the indicator without knowing how the indicator works?

2. Is it possible to create an indicator that checks for three conditions to be simultaneously met, and once all those conditions are met it simply produces a TRUE signal that a strategy can use as the trigger to enter a position? Or can indicators only create data, and the strategy has to use that data to determine if conditions are met?

3. If #2 is possible, does that decrease efficiency or limit the ways you can change the variables of the indicators and strategy?

Thanks for your help.

[NinjaTrader_RyanM1]

Hi otayah,

Thanks for the post and welcome to the NinjaTrader forums!

1) You can have the indicator programmer package it in an assembly, and optionally protect using CliSecure. With this, the strategy programmer can have access to the indicator values, but not view the source code. You will still likely want the source code available on your end though.

2) Strategies access data from indicators, and it's possible that the data it accesses is a bool flag or belonging to a boolseries, like true or false. These bool flags can be assigned within the indicator as true in the case that the 3 indicator conditions are met.

You can access indicator plot values from a strategy without additional code. To access other, non-plot values, the indicator programmer must follow the principles in this reference sample, and you should be aware of the names used so that you can pass along to the strategy programmer.

http://www.ninjatrader.com/support/forum/showthread.php?t=4991

3) It does not decrease efficiency, but the indicator programmer needs to be aware of how the script will ultimately be used and may need to setup dummy strategies to confirm everything is working.

[otayah]

Thanks for your quick response.

Is CliSecure comparable to RemoteSoft's Salamander? I noticed an older Ninja help guide (http://www.ninjatrader-support.com/HelpGuideV6/helpguide.html?Export1) mentioned having a $299 special for RemoteSoft for Ninja customers, whereas I see on the CliSecure website that a license is $795. Are they equal protection for the same situation?

[NinjaTrader_Bertrand]

otayah, that was a special price for NinjaTrader users on the legacy RemoteSoft technology used for 6.5 and early NT7 versions - from NT7 R3 onwards and higher we would only support the CLISecure DLL's, this option is build right into NT7 and does not need a dedicated license purchase then by you. We feel the security is level is comparable and use the product ourselves.

[otayah]

Thank you. I have some follow-ups after reading more:

1. My custom indicator will continuously determine how much price has changed in the past X number of seconds. If this custom indicator is used in combination with a couple of longer-term standard indicators, will this amount of processing be possible in a strategy with 100-200 stocks? I have a desktop i7 2.8 Ghz with 12 GB RAM and a laptop i5 2.3 Ghz with 4GB RAM.

2. If that amount of processing is difficult for regular PC’s, are there ways to reduce the load? For instance, if the boolean indicator (“true” trade signal) is dependent on 3 sub-indicators simultaneously giving the necessary values, can the Boolean indicator look back to collect data for indicators B and C on just that 1 stock ONLY AFTER indicator A already reaches the necessary value? Or does the indicator/strategy need to collect/store all the data of every stock ahead of time?

3. For this boolean indicator (“true” trade signal) that relies on 3 sub-indicators simultaneously having the necessary values, I’d like to have a log of every true signal in a grid-style for reivew. The log would include symbol, time, price, and the values of several custom and standard indicators at the time of true signal. The Market Analyzer window updates values constantly so you don’t have that moment frozen in time, and it doesn’t seem possible to customize the Alerts Window to include indicator values in its grid. What’s the best way to get this info into a spreadsheet each day so that I can evaluate my trade signals?

[NinjaTrader_Bertrand]

otayah, it's very hard to predict any processing power needed for a custom project, but working with 100-200 symbols should be feasible on a dedicated, high performing machine. You could unfortunately not selectively / dynamically load data-streams, although this is already logged as feature suggestion for future consideration.

If you would like to log your signals using the alerts window, you could could customize the string displayed to include for example signal states and symbol / dataseries it originated from.