NinjaTrader screwed up with Zen-Fire data feed

WideEyed you must be bringing in the BIG BUCKS. I never heard that free was a good reason not to use a product that works. As for different time frames, my strategy doesn't change. The only thing that changes is the candle size. Price action is price action.

I'm a novice when it comes to trading.

But I'm an expert when it comes to life LOL

MT4 isn't free, somebody's paying for it and it's the person for whom MT is making money. There's plenty of material around on how and why MT works in the broker's interest, not yours.

It's like with Facebook. That's free too, right? But if you're not paying for it you're the product being sold.

When it comes to trading I want to buy and sell; I don't want to be bought and sold. But the main reason I don't use MT is not the price, it's about having DOM and a proper data feed direct from market and not routed through a broker.

BTW, you didn't understand my point about M15 ... but never mind.

Wow, an expert on life. That's a first. Point is.... TO EACH IT'S OWN........ I'm not here to understand, I'm here to make MONEY....There is enough money for brokers, you and me. As a novice trader you fail to realize this. My point is NinjaTrader is down MetaTrader is still up. (What does Facebook have to do with this???)

You clearly don't understand trading or platforms, or the way they work.
First, a platform is a front end, so NinjaTrader is not down, its one of the feeds to it cant get itself going. I assume you know what a data feed is?

Let me rephrase; If you use NinjaTrader you are not trading...... If you use MetaTrader trade on as usual...... THAT I CLEARLY UNDERSTAND...........

Oh and Camino NEVER ASSUME..........

I'm glad you're making enough money to spread around to brokers and others.

But when I increased position size (from the days when I used to use Metatrader) I found commissions to be a lot, lot cheaper than spreads. It would be even cheaper if I was any good at bargaining with my broker!

As has already been pointed out, NinjaTrader is not down, it's the ZenFire data feed. And if I did want to use NinjaTrader today I could - there are several free data feeds available (but you know my position on "free" ;-)). I make no criticism of anyone using MT. Good luck to them. The MT reliability isn't good enough for me ...and when I talk reliability, I'm not talking about it going down. I've never known it to go down. I'm talking about reliability of data. That kind of steady round-the-year "hidden" unreliability is, to me, more of a concern than my current ZenFire problems.

I never pay commissions and my spreads stay the same regardless of my position size. You don't have to bargain with your broker. If your account is large enough they will do what ever you want. If not get a broker that will........

WideEyed,

I very much appreciate your post below. I am in the process of looking for alternatives to MT4 and NinjaTrader was pretty high on my list. You however confirmed me fears of a transition that is considerably more complicated that it appears on first glance. Do you have any experience with integrating Ninja with InteractiveBrokers? If so, do you still need to choose price feed provider, execution engine etc? It seems like if there was a seamless solution where all you needed to do was to have a broker trading API to hook NT into, a switch to NT would be a much easier sell.

Aim

Hi Imino,

Who is your broker if you are not using an ECN broker but are happy enough to have a large deposit with a MM?

Not real comfortable putting that info on a forum. Do your home work, they are out there...

Yeah, right!

You're going to be sorely disappointed. I make no claim to having a large account, but from what I do know regulatory, operational and other restrictions/limitations mean not only that they cannot do whatever you want, they can't even do whatever they want! I hope you don't discover it the hard way. From what I hear elsewhere ALL large accounts pay only commission, not spread. There are several papers around examining why that's a far more economical choice beyond anything but the smallest level players.

AimHigher, sorry, I've no experience with IB. However, as I've stated before, I do recommend NinjaTrader for their fantastic support. I doubt that any other platform provider would have bent over backwards as much as NT did to help traders affected by a problem not of their own making. Going back to IB, and again with the disclaimer that I have no great knowledge of them, I believe IB is the closest you can get to what you term a seamless solution. Make a list of your questions and give them a call and see what you make of their response. Would you let us know how you get on?

Maybe it's a good thing there isn't a one-stop solution. There seem to be some traders who are best off sticking to MT4 if you know what I mean

This is exactly why I don't usually participate in forums. Okay, I am sorry I step on some toes. NinjaTrader is the best thing since sliced bread. And if this is being disappointed, I hope it continues for years to come. And yes I stick to what works for me... Remember The Best Things In Life Are Free.... Good luck in your trading and hopefully one day you can claim to have a large account. Don't hate the Player Hate the Game....... It's not the platform It's the Trader......KISS keep-it-simply-simple........SUPPORT RESISTANCE This is what's important.........

Fair call, best to to mention forex brokers names on a forex forum

WideEyed,

Thanks for your comments. I'll keep an open mind about NinjaTrader.

I like InteractiveBrokers in general but I have used them almost exclusively for equities. Also, I need zero hand holding or flashy visuals, just fast, reliable and cheap (as in commission + spread + slippage) execution and I have found no better alternative than IB for equities. The way they handle forex trades (at least last time I checked) was a bit of a pain since profits would stay in the currency they were transacted which then had to be manually converted to the account currency, usually at rather unfavorable rates. That made no sense to me and is why I stopped doing any forex trading with them. Furthermore, since I asked my question to you, I found out that their minimum commission per trade basically force you to trade in standard lots which a lot of my systems could not handle given my current account size. Hence, I have no immediate plans to go the IB + Ninjatrader route. If I do, I will let you know how it goes.

Just a slight correction to what you said regarding spread. Everyone does pay a market spread although in forex it can at times go to zero or even negative since the liquidity providers put up, more or less, independent quotes so the lowest Ask among any of the LP's could at a given time be lower than the highest Bid among the LP's, hence creating a negative or inverse spread. However, most of the time spread will be positive. I think it is fair to say that the largest accounts will use the account types that simply pass on the raw market prices from the LPs to the client and also use brokers with the most competitive pool of LP's. Hence the broker has to charge a commission since they don't pad the spread. I view brokers that don't charge a commission and add their markup to the spread instead with a lot of skepticism since even if done in a fair manner it obfuscates what the real market price is. However, if a reputable STP broker says that you can pay a commission of $6 per round trip or have 0.4 pips added to the spread and pay no commission I would take the second option since it would be cheaper on a net basis since $6 commission would come out to 0.6 pips for a pair like EUR/USD.

A lot of people seem to be almost in love with MT4 and if their trading style is not impacted by the limitations (lack of real limit orders for example) then great. Why switch? I honestly don't have that many gripes (albeit a few critical ones) with MT4/MQL4 since I have been able to code pretty much everything I wanted. I have found the execution issues have more to do with the setup on my end (choice of broker, VPS provider etc), at least it has varied a lot for me depending on broker & VPS combination. The fact that it is much more complicated to get the "perfect" setup combination of broker, price feed etc for your trading style with NinjaTrader could give you an edge if you find one, relative to those who use the broker provided, seamless solutions.

If there was a broker that could somehow offer FIX connectivity through MT4 I would not be looking to switch for the time being. However, I have been told it is impossible, so I will keep looking for alternatives.

Aim

I'm a big ninja trader fan myself. Yesterday I started up my trading computer after a long holiday and noticed a new update so I went ahead and installed the update before starting NT. After the update my NT gave me a lot of error messages and I just couldn't figure out to resolve it myself so I submitted a ticket ... and to my surprise I had a reply a few minutes later. After a few mails the NT support access my computer and fixed the problem in just a matter of minutes. That is a damn good customer service - considering this was a Saturday evening

There are different options available for NT users ... apart from FXCM and IB you can connect to any MT4 broker with a bridge. There is also software available that will allow you to connect to LMAX and Dukascopy.

Very well put AimHigher. You seem to a lot of knowledge of what goes on in the Forex Trading World.

Good ECN brokers are : IB & MB Trading. My personal favorite is http://www.mbtrading.com/exnspread.aspx
Platform: NinjaTrader running on the dedicated machine 24/5 and on a STATIC IP (Ninja crashes sometimes on dinamic IP internet connection but it never crashed on Static)
Trading is a business and only the best is good enough for me.
So in nutshell, guys, forget about most of these brokers who advertise here of FF, they are just Bucket Shops, i want to trade against other traders not against my broker.

Ninja Trader is one of the WORST platform and the most greedy platform provider ever. No let me rephrase that: Ninja Trader is the WORST platform and the most greedy platform provider ever. MetaQuotes is a saint comparing to them. I can't believe they have the gall to come up here and boast about their platform. I used to be with Ninja Trader and they start off offering Ninja Trader for free but then I started to get such BAD price spike candles of like 9000 pips and that rendered all of the indicators completely out of wack because they are all skewed by the bad data. At first, this would happen once in a month and usually at daily cut-off time at 5:00 PM EST and would happen to just one currency. Towards the end this would happen on a daily basis, everyday I was getting bad data to the point I was not able to get price feed at all. So I inquired with their technical support which were totally clueless and useless. They used to ask me to send totally irrelevant screenshots and logs and then the answer that they give me is it's my broker's problem for providing them bad price data and/or bad API depending on who you talk to. And they absolutely refused to fix it for me. So I had to do research myself and find out that the only way to fix the bad data is manually inputting each of the candle Open, Close, High, Low information one by one into an Excel Spreadsheet for the bad candle data over the smallest tf where the spike happened and in order to do that, you would have to completely erase an entire day (where the spike candle falls under) of price data first and then input the correct candle information. (So for those of you who are still stuck with Ninja Trader and are encountering this same issue, this is what you can do). But the problem is if you are not able to find a reliable source for the correct price data which is usually provided one day behind, then you lose that entire day anyway because all of the indicators would need to take about 2 or 3 days to start to give off correct information.

And what is more appalling is that Ninja Trader actually could've quite easily fixed these bad data themselves in the software in maximum of a day. I have encountered the same problem on very rare occasions on other platforms as well and they get fixed right away and sometimes I don't even notice it. And yet Ninja Trader chose to give their customers the run-around and refused to help me and not only that, they tried to force me to upgrade to a newer version and then buy from them a 3rd-party data package which they claim would never have this problem. I suspect Ninja Trade deliberately screwed up the data so to force the customers to buy 3rd-party data packages from them. I have NEVER had any problems with price data feed when viewing them from my broker's own platform or chart software or whatever so how is it it's all of sudden become bad when they display them? Pathetic.

Plus their platform is a joke. It's so slow to load up and eats away chunks of memory from your RAM. Their programming language is C# (which is actually the only highlight of their system - I enjoyed programming in C#) but their compiler is so crappy that it never compiles correctly the first time and is always full of bugs. I would always had to run the same code through the compiler again and again and again and the result would still not be correct and then all of sudden everything would be fine and the result is correct and I have made no changes whatsoever to the code. But then the program would have such bad memory leaks and they are really CPU intensive that if you have multiple charts open running multiple indicators, the software would slow to a crawl and you can't even run anything else on your computer.

So, faced with so many problems, I did the only thing that any sensible traders would do: LEAVE, never ever go back to them AND warn everybody that he/she comes in contact with to stay away from that greedy company. We traders are already getting fleeced by our brokers and we are already struggling to try to make +ve profits. What makes them think that we would have all those piles of cash lying around to give them especially when they didn't even provide a quality product in that they couldn't even provide decent price data which is the only thing that we rely on to trade? And they think they can force us to pay for something so crappy? I wouldn't even give them a CENT even if I am George Soros! You want people to buy your products and services, you better come up with good quality products and services that people need (good example: WhatsApp) not by deliberately not fixing your products and then force your customers to pay to get good ones. Good riddance!

So traders beware. At least their free version of Ninja Trader would run not too bad except the slowness of the interface, and the problems with their programming facility; at least you are getting price data. But eventually this is what can happen to you. They screw things up for you to force you to pay. I am just surprised that such a bad company is still around and hasn't been shut down yet.

If anyone is looking for good alternatives to MQ, I can recommend two platforms that I have used since I moved on from the joke of Ninja Trader: 1) Sierra Charts (www.sierracharts.com) They are highly reliable with API's to many brokers and with a HUGE library of indicators and they are super-fast. And if there is any price data issue or anything that has happened to their server or system, they get fixed right away or at least you get alert right away. And their technical support is a forum and has very fast response time. And they are quite knowledgeable about issues and if they don't know the answer, because it's forum-based, other users can post their solutions and help you out. The only thing is their programming facility for you to create your own custom indicators is not that user-friendly and is kind of "black-box" so it's really hard for you to create your own custom indicators. And their platform is only free for 1 month, after that, their most basic service costs $19.99/month so if you are running a profit from your trading and you are really savvy with programming (I think their programming language is C) then you can give them a try. I was quite happy with them until they didn't have indicators that I was looking for in their libraries and I didn't wan to pay someone to code it for me. 2) VT Trader (http://www.cmsfx.com/en/trading-soft...ader/overview/). That's another really good platform that's extremely user-friendly and has a very dynamic and powerful interface. VT Trader also has an exceptionally good backtesting facility that provides data across all TF's going back to several years even early 2000's, yes BEFORE the financial crisis so you can salivate at the number of daily pips that the market was giving out. It's a platform that was created and designed by forex traders themselves so it really has traders' needs in mind. Their custom indicator builder is script-based so it's really easy to use. And it's free. But I think you have to be with CMSForex to use them. I know CMSForex got bought at some point so I don't know what happened to VT Trader.

Hope this helps.

Wow, thats one long post.

To summarise: you don't like NinjaTader.

What platform do you use, MT4?

Have you used Multicharts and if so what do you think of it!

Cheers