[gooni]

Valid concerns darthtrader. It took me a few months to get 'efficient' with NeoTicker, and now I can test things faster than any other platform. But here's where I find the most benefit:

- The option of true time-driven charting (as opposed to bar-driven), allowing combinations of many different kinds of series on a single chart. Imagine taking signals off a 15-minute chart and managing the trade using a 100-tick chart?

- Creating managed time- or bar- series to support decisions, easily plottable. In fact, and this might be the same as NinjaTrader, a system is just a special form of indicator. Nearly everything is series and can be used by anything to else to make on the fly decisions.

- Superposition plugin, allowing us to create custom series. I haven't used this as much yet, but have some ideas regarding volatility based bar series.

- NeoBreadth indicators (like TICK16, but you can do practically anything really). Anyone who follows breadth in general should look at this alone as a reason to come to NeoTicker.

- Tick Replay, allowing tick-based indicators to be used in system development and while looking at historical data. This is usually things to do with bid/ask analysis that require every tick to be replayed.

- Simulation Server, that can use the disk cache to replay the whole platform (not just a chart). The Simulation Server requires a restart of NeoTicker and the platform pretty much treats it as just another data server (like eSignal, IQFeed etc). I'm sure you can imagine how useful that is. You can even replay trading systems at say 5x speed and get realistic fills from the trade simulator.

- An OLE layer that allows automation of the entire platform.

- Grid Optimizer product for optimisation (haven't used yet, heard very good things).

- Being outside the US and trading many markets, NeoTicker actually handles timezones properly.

- I think it's probably more efficient than NinjaTrader if you want to have 50 charts open, I never got very far with NinjaTrader.

- A proper pattern scan architecture (but I don't use it, no stocks for me!).

Of course, there are some downsides. It is, at the moment, not great for Forex. They are having some stability issues with some of the order managers in the latest build, and the support forum can take over a day to get back to you. Certainly, the 'community' is smaller than NinjaTrader. But NeoTicker do make sure to tell you that their institutional customers far outweigh retail. Take that how you will.

One final caveat - I'd be prepared to switch in an instance if something better came along. Rewriting strategies is not a mammoth task, and I'd rather retain the flexibility of being able to choose at all times. Hence, anything major I do in NeoTicker (ie, beyond prototyping), I do in C#.