are nt automated strategies reliable at all?

[bltdavid]

if eventually i can get [..snip..] solid enough programming and so on, and i am able to develop a strategy that could make profits consistently while controlling risks, i would then try to put together enough capital to trade and give it a try. meanwhile, i will just stick to doing free research on my leisure time.

I will not discourage you from developing your own strategy.

But my recommendation is this:
Consider investing capital in the purchase/rental/lease of a proven auto-trading system.

Whether you have or want full source code to the system is up to you, but it's not strictly necessary. Very powerful NinjaScript strategies may consist of dozens of files, and many tens of thousands of lines of code. Professional software engineers could easily have spent hundreds and even thousands of hours developing the code in that system (and it still may not make money!)

You act like it's trivial to write your own strategy. But, honestly, for the kind of robustness everyone says they want in their strategies, it is extremely non-trivial and can require many advanced programming techniques to achieve that high level of sophistication.

My point is: if you really want to make money, and you have a decent amount of money to begin with, consider gaining an edge on 'father time' and spend some of that capital to acquire a working auto-trading solution, rather than learning how to build one yourself from scratch.

Another idea: have you perused the list of NinjaTrader consultants?

[NinjaTrader_PatrickH]

i would say nt is sufficiently reliable if automated strategies can be left trading unattended for a couple of hours and also overnight and they do take the trades they should as price action presents them and not stop working or make huge mistakes.

It would not be recommended in any case to leave automated strategies running unattended. Circumstances can occur that you would want to intervene on such as an internet disconnection.

[rtwave]

NT has cornered the market space/competition as of a year or 2 ago.

Futures are pretty much their domain now as they bought out Mirus.

http://www.financemagnates.com/forex/brokers/ninjatrader-acquires-mirus-futures-launches-ninjatrader-brokerage/

Some of us are grandfathered into what we had with our brokers.

$4 round trip ES futures appears to be near standard....

I'm not seeing much difference with Rithmic and Continuum Feed....

Are you looking at scalping ticks?

What is your data connection? DSL? CABLE MODEM? 3G ? 4g? download/upload speeds? a lot of Europeans have issues in hot markets with FOMC and complain about lag... of MINUTES...

There are too many variables to answer you question.. ????


edit:

http://ninjatrader.com/support/forum...ad.php?t=78238

sledge, thanks.


i have also started looking for this same information on bmt.


you mention something that is interesting to me. with ts, between ****ing cme's and their own commissions, a trade in futures is around $5 usd per swing, which is, in my opinion, outrageously too ****ing much. a mother****ing scandal. $4 per trade sounds somewhat better, and i will keep looking to see if there exist even cheaper alternatives still (although that would imply other considerations like how good of a platform / data feed / broker you get going cheaper still).


i'm not thinking of doing anything similar to hft or tick scalping, my interest on data providers is more with reliability of the service, general accuracy of the information and price.

my internet connection is 10mb down / 1mb up, standard cable stuff in méxico. but if i was making money enough and it made sense, i would have no problem in renting out a dedicated server in the usa to run my automated strategies. i understand there are some nice offers for around 100 usd a month which is perfectly manageable.

[rtwave]

I will not discourage you from developing your own strategy.

But my recommendation is this:
Consider investing capital in the purchase/rental/lease of a proven auto-trading system.

Whether you have or want full source code to the system is up to you, but it's not strictly necessary. Very powerful NinjaScript strategies may consist of dozens of files, and many tens of thousands of lines of code. Professional software engineers could easily have spent hundreds and even thousands of hours developing the code in that system (and it still may not make money!)

You act like it's trivial to write your own strategy. But, honestly, for the kind of robustness everyone says they want in their strategies, it is extremely non-trivial and can require many advanced programming techniques to achieve that high level of sophistication.

My point is: if you really want to make money, and you have a decent amount of money to begin with, consider gaining an edge on 'father time' and spend some of that capital to acquire a working auto-trading solution, rather than learning how to build one yourself from scratch.

Another idea: have you perused the list of NinjaTrader consultants?

bltdavid, thanks.



so far i'm pretty convinced a simple strategy that tries to follow longer trends using simple stuff like an ema can work. as long as one can filter out choppy movements such strategies can do ok. if nt allows handling multiple orders that have different stops and targets which get calculated as prices move that would be a magnificent refinement to the strategies i have in mind.

and i know if i can't code those strategies for nt, in the end i could always go back to ts as long as i am willing to pay 20% more in commissions plus platform fees and such.


on the other hand, i'm completely skeptical of the second idea you mention. i am pretty convinced there are no profitable automated strategies for sale. if anyone has a profitable system, they would keep trading it and scaling it; there's no need to do anything else about it, least of all letting others get a piece of a money making machine. unless a vendor is willing to let me watch something like a live screen share of their strategies trading in real time, i wouldn't consider any strategy for sale to be legit. and then, right now i don't have the capital to trade live, much less to buy a strategy or pay for programmers. i would never say never, but hunting for automated strategies for sale is not my priority right now.

[sledge]

bltdavid, thanks.



so far i'm pretty convinced a simple strategy that tries to follow longer trends using simple stuff like an ema can work. as long as one can filter out choppy movements such strategies can do ok. if nt allows handling multiple orders that have different stops and targets which get calculated as prices move that would be a magnificent refinement to the strategies i have in mind.

Good luck with the impossible.