I wanted to get a sense of how important hotkeys are to people who use NinjaTrader. I know it is something that I would really, really, really like to / need to have as a short-term trader. In a fast moving market using the mouse on the SuperDOM is impossible, and requires you to always take the market at the ask or bid, which essentially kills a number of short-term scalping strategies. In other words, without hotkeys NinjaTrader is basically 100% ruled out for this type of activity.
Considering how easy it should be to implement hotkeys from a coding perspective, I'm amazed that this hasn't been done yet. All we seem to hear is a bunch of "thanks for the suggestion, we'll consider it" stuff which isn't very helpful.
Here is one way that hotkeys could be very easily implemented:
1. Have a menu option in the SuperDOM to turn hotkeys on or off. Since it would be off by default, it won't affect those who don't know about or want to use it.
2. If hotkeys is turned on, then trap every keystroke, but only if the SuperDOM in question is the active window (i.e. if a chart window is active then ignore, or if another SuperDOM window is active then use that window's settings).
3. Allow the user to define keys for the following things:
- buy at market
- sell at market
- limit buy at market +/- predefined amount (for example, buy at market + 5 ticks, or buy at market - 1 tick)... allow up to 3 different "custom buy limit" buttons to define different levels for this
- limit buy at bid +/- predefined amount (for example, buy at bid + 1 tick, or buy at bid - 3 ticks)... allow up to 3 different "custom buy limit" buttons to define different levels for this
- do the same thing for limit sell buttons as for buy buttons in the previous two lines
- allow for up to 10 buttons to instantly define lot sizes according to use preference (for example, if you set up the keypad, you could make "0" the default lot size, then make the numbers 1 through 5 equal to 1 lot, 2 lot, 3 lot, 5 lot, and 10 lot, or something... whatever the user wanted)
- A button for cancel all orders
- A button for close all positions
- A button for reverse position
I'm sure that there are many more you can think of.
This should very simple to do guys - all you have to do is trap the keystroke and feed it it into the same code that the mouse click action now performs, if the user has the SuperDOM window active and hotkeys turned on. This is not more than a 1 week programming job, and to be honest I am completely surprised that you haven't done this already, considering that a number of your customers have asked for it.
You guys do realize that not having hotkeys completely eliminates your platform from contention for any short-term scalpers who trade in fast moving markets, don't you? Why are you throwing money away when this is so easy to fix?
Anyways, let's take a poll... how many people agree with me?
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