I'm thinking about creating a top-notched trading platform

Trading Tech and Tools
1

Hi,

  Recently I discovered a very good platform called Protrader. If I had to rank it among Ninjatrader, FXCM trading station, ctrader, and MT4, I would have it as the best platform I have seen. Fortunately, it is now also being offered to FXCM clients. But as good as Protrader is, it's still missing some critical features that I would like. Because my voice is very small for making suggestions for any of those platforms I just mentioned, I thought about creating a trading platform after so much frustration.

  I have programming experience and I absolutely know that this won't be an easy task. A matter of fact, it can also be expensive. I would've to pay for a data feed, unless my broker offers it to me for free. I believe they have an API that I can connect a software too.  I would also like for my platform to have instant access to multiple indicators and trading robots, so I would see if I can get permission to MQL4 from Metaquotes. I'm not a fan of MQL4, so eventually, I would create my own programming language that is easy and very powerful at the same time. I want to make sure that the documentations on how to program is there too. My program will also have a powerful simulator, backtester, optimizer, and more. It is not the point of this email for me to list all of the features I'm going to use. I'm trying to get an idea of time, cost, and commitment involved. 

 So, if you have any expertise in this field, please feel free to provide me with information. Also,  I wrote this on the fly during class and I apologize if I have any typos.

Thanks

2

Bern,

That is quite some commitment. I think the API you are reffering to is FIX.

What critical functionalities are you missing? Perhaps we already covered those with scripts.

I am interested.

3

Thanks Toekan for your reply. You seem to be an active and contributing member to the forum.

During the summer, I was trying to create a Ninjatrader strategy. I was excited about this because I trade using rules and I can program those rules into a ninjascript. Unfortunately, back-testing was an impossible task. Ninjatrader didn’t have tick data; I can understand why because it would take up a lot of storage. But without that type of data, your results would be so far off from the truth that it would be useless. You could somewhat create a strategy on Ninjatrader that executes trades and closes them based on the close of the bar, but even with that, the spread is like 4 pips and if you’re back-testing for a period of a year, you could’ve opened up dozens and dozens of trades during that time, and while the 4 pips spread is only 2 pips bigger than the actual average, it makes a significant difference over that period of time. So basically, there are no great back-testing systems out right now that I like.

I would love to have a good simulator that I can use at different times without losing my results. Ninjatrader doesn’t provide this feature. Your account balance would reset as soon as you close the system down. It would also be good to FF, RW, pause, and a quick convenient replay feature (this is great if you accidentally missed something I would like to go back in time a few bars). You can move the bar back in Ninjatrader, but you would lose all your results.

Also, it would be great if they had a built-in alert system on the charts. So if prices touches a resistance level and bounced back down like 15 pips, maybe, price is going to respect that level and I can go short. It would be great if I can get an alarm and possibly use the if-statements to execute that trade from my charts. Protrader has a system similar to this, but I wish I could do a little bit more with it.

This is just a few of the many things. Also, I really, really, really, really hate that Ninjatrader doesn’t have a legit workspace. I don’t like the floating windows. I prefer for the information that I feel is important to be on one window.

I’m not blasting Ninjatrader, it just some things that I feel they could do a lot better. These are some of the many, many features that I have a dream about creating one day. I wanted to quickly respond to your post Toekan, so I left out some other great ideas that I have. I can list them as soon as I leave class for the day, if you like.

4

MT4 offers the signals that you are looking for, and you can program those. MT4 will send you either an email (but non-ssl) so you need to have something in place to cover that as providers don’t like that. But What I like better is the notifcation function. That sends a signal to your phone (and watch :)), that covers all my needs.

There is also a tester function, but I agree that your Pause button suggestion would be an improvement. There are some better tester alternatives available, but I haven’t looked at it really.

For short term it might be interesting for you to get to know MT4 a bit better. Not the webtrader, but the standalone application.