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NinjaTrader 8 vs Wealth Lab Pro - for Stocks
22.06.2020 20.54

Not Course Related

NinjaCoding friend

I use NinjaTrader 8 to trade stocks via TD Ameritrade account. Ever since TDA started offering commission-free trades, they've maxed out their capacity and order acknowledgments during peak hours takes as long as 30 minutes to come through. The script that I've written requires instantaneous order acknowledgement in order to take advantage of small price moves. As it is now, I can get in a trade, but without the order acknowledgement, I can't get out of the trade because NT8 doesn't know that I'm even in trade. When I called TDA, they said that this is an issue that they're working on weekends, to add capacity, but couldn't give me an estimated completion date. Due to my strategy taking advantage of small price moves, the commissions from Interactive Brokers would eat up most of the profits on each winning trade. I came across Fidelity's Wealth Lab Pro software and was wondering if this would be a good alternative until TDA gets their act together.

  • Yuri Zolotarev
    23.06.2020 08:53

    I have coded many strategies for Wealth Lab but since I am not a US citizen I could never have a Fidelity account open and although I made a coding course for Wealth Lab there was no chance so I have no idea how Wealth Lab behaves in a live market.

    Nevertheless WL is an extremely powerful analysis software with a few functions that NT lacks such as:

    - it is separated into different modules so you can easily code your own portfolio management algorithms and commission modules which is really cool and NinjaTrader doesn't have this

    - you can easily execute your strategy on a list of symbols

    - you can test in portfolio mode and see summed up performance

    However WL has also a few disadvantages:

    - very small community

    - non US people can't trade unless they invent some 3rd party adapters for whatever markets they need

    So as for you particular situation, I can't say anything about live but for the rest is all as above. I must also mention that the API is quite clean so its easy to get going with the code but the design is a bit different. 


  • NinjaCoding friend
    30.04.2022 16:28

    Hi Yuri, I use WealthLab it is a great software. They are now with a new version WL8 which is independent of Fidelity so you could use it as a foreigner.

    I  really like your course at UdeMy on WL version 6.5. I hope you do one course on WL scripting for version 8 since they did quite a few changes and improvements. Thank you.