Multicharts

[rflumerfelt]

I'm considering moving from Tradestation to either NinjaTrader or Multicharts so that I can trade multiple instruments through a single account at IB. I started a trial of Multicharts yesterday and I have been impressed with what it can do; however, I ran across a bug. I contacted tech support, who confirmed it was a known issue.

While I really like the Multicharts platform so far and the tech support was amazing, I'm concerned about the stability of this platform when I find a bug my first day of using it (it's possible that I'm just unlucky). For those of you who use Multicharts, I have a few questions:

1. How stable and bug-free is the platform. Do you trust it to not blow up during algo trading or placing orders?
2. How seamless is the interaction with Interactive Brokers?
3. Are there more capabilities for customization in the .Net version than the standard version, or is it just another way of doing the same things you can do with Easy Language? I would love to hear experience from anyone who has used the .Net version.
4. If you have used both Multicharts and Ninja Trader, particularly with IB, how would you rate the stability of each platform?

Thanks in advance for your help/comments/advice.

 

[TickCOM]

1. Not possible as such to answer, since new bugs are introduced when changes are made to the platform - so almost any platform will have bugs, question is the type of bug, and where. It should not be in trading execution, or running an automated strategy - that is a dealbreaker.
2. Main problem is with IB TWS, it will close automatically during the day and the trading platform will have to restart TWS. IB often change the Windows ID of TWS, so that require an update on the trading platform to keep working.
3. As to Easy Language, the future is non-programming.

 

[1nvest]

I'm considering moving from Tradestation to either NinjaTrader or Multicharts so that I can trade multiple instruments through a single account at IB. I started a trial of Multicharts yesterday and I have been impressed with what it can do; however, I ran across a bug. I contacted tech support, who confirmed it was a known issue.

While I really like the Multicharts platform so far and the tech support was amazing, I'm concerned about the stability of this platform when I find a bug my first day of using it (it's possible that I'm just unlucky). For those of you who use Multicharts, I have a few questions:

1. How stable and bug-free is the platform. Do you trust it to not blow up during algo trading or placing orders?
2. How seamless is the interaction with Interactive Brokers?
3. Are there more capabilities for customization in the .Net version than the standard version, or is it just another way of doing the same things you can do with Easy Language? I would love to hear experience from anyone who has used the .Net version.
4. If you have used both Multicharts and Ninja Trader, particularly with IB, how would you rate the stability of each platform?

Thanks in advance for your help/comments/advice.

I can't answer all your questions but can give some of my views if that helps..clearly the lack of responses probably shows how many people are either using multicharts or integrate with IB
1)Nothing is bug free, however you can only judge on past performance. I'd be asking myself how many times is an update made, if there are continuous updates you have a system that in itself isnt very mature and is prone therefore to more error. you dont want something that comes up with more and more updates because frankly, there is little more you really need. I'd stick to something known and is competent at what it does, so if there is a bug, i'd steer clear
2) seamless with IB is dependent on the interface. tickcom suggests that IB TWS comes down during the day, that's quite odd, given that many route their trades using IB including people i'd helped develop interfaces to IB.TWS is also not the interface but the gui to the platform, you're not going to be interfacing with the gui. you will be bypassing TWS which is the point of the interface. so im not sure how much emphasis id place on that statement. but equally i've not interfaced to IB via multicharts. i've interfaced to IB via other platforms, and they have been absolutely fine including relatively high frequency where we are first calling the data (price) from IB into the platform of choice, and then routing the order back to IB in the space of seconds. not once is TWS invoked
3) yes there is much more capability in .net over easy language. easy language has its limitations but this is relative. relative to what you are looking to do. building indicators in easy language, its fine, building something more complex its quite limited. i would ask yourself what are you looking to customise in the first place, because the chances are there is a platform already able to do this for you. nothing wrong with having different platforms for different needs, depending on what that need is. this limits the amount of customisation required and then goes back to point 1. if you need to customise the platform, you bring in bugs. i would stick to something more stable. ninja has its own language called ninjascript, its based however on C# which is very stable, and likely will find easier to learn.
4) Ninjatrader i found far better than multicharts. It too has its limitations, but as a preference definitely it would be ninjatrader. again, all depends what you want to do

apologies for not being more specific but hope it helps..for reference i've used many different platforms over the years, more than i can probably remember and writing down!

 

[TickCOM]

I do not "suggest", I know, with years of trading over the TWS API. TWS is the traditional API endpoint, there is also a minimal implementation called TWS Gateway. They both reset 1-2 times daily. I say all IB supporting platforms use the TWS API, since these platforms have supported this API for many years. The new Python API is also connecting using TWS or TWS Gateway, but is much slower than the TCP based API, and with limited API features.

The mentioned trading and development platforms are outdated, you should look for more modern platforms supporting on-the-fly development non-programming.