I am a long-time user (since 2022) and I am writing to express my profound frustration with the NinjaTrader 8 platform. The platform’s performance has degraded to the point where it is no longer a reliable tool, but rather a direct obstacle to my trading success and a cause of financial loss.
My primary issues are as follows:
Systemic Instability: The platform is plagued by constant freezing and stalling. These freezes are not random; they often occur during critical market moments, preventing order management and costing me money.
Inexplicable Data Loading: A persistent issue is with chart loading. Charts that are part of my standard workspace and loaded perfectly the day before will suddenly take 30-60 minutes to load, if they load at all.
Failed In-Day Fixes: When these issues arise, multiple attempts to restart, clear caches, or otherwise “fix” the platform during the trading day are often futile, effectively ending my trading day.
This adds an enormous layer of frustration to an already high-stress profession. These are not isolated incidents. I and many other traders, as seen on your forums, have been complaining about this “strange behavior” for a long time.
My frustration is compounded by the fact that official NinjaTrader support appears unable to troubleshoot or resolve these issues. The timing of these failures often feels targeted, and discovering that the parent company is now a crypto-focused firm has unfortunately only added to my concern and mistrust.
The platform should be the solution, not the problem. Right now, it is the problem.
I would like to continue with Ninjatrader, but I am checking and testing Sierra. I don’t want to take the risk of losing a lot of money because of NT8 problems. If needed, I can switch immediately to Sierra. One day, not being able to trade can cost me a 5 figure amount of missed profits. Paying for Sierra as backup is much cheaper than losing one day trading. I use NT7/8 since 2014. Before that time, I was at Tradestation for over 10 years.
Before the take-over by Kraken I was very satisfied, I even emailed Ray to congratulate him and told him that his product was much better than Tradestation.
Support was awesome.
The last three months I spent more time with, first a bot and then with customer support, than I ever did with Ninjatrader in more than 10 years.
It is a pity that such a good product deteriorated so fast after the take-over.
Maybe NinjaTrader got rid of their engineers and hired a bunch of vibe coders. Seriously, if the platform is that important to your day to day operation, then you should just move on. I would start with using Ninja as your platform to view charts (assuming your indicators are all on there, hoping it doesn’t crash on you), trade in a different platform, have a backup chart as you migrate over to a different platform.
I have been maintaining a comprehensive backup system for several years. That has nothing to do with what is happening now at Ninjatrader. I just added a Sierra setup as backup a few weeks ago. Just in case NT8 would stop to work like it should.
I have another PC with NT8 installed exactly as it is on my trading PC. If any problem (software or hardware) I can switch to my backup PC and continue to trade within 1 minute. This backup setting did cost me just the price of a PC, which is less than my average daily profit.
One thing I’ll throw out there is that I’ve found deleting my cache folder from Documents → NinjaTrader 8 → db and then restarting resolves most of my issues. When it doesn’t, and one of the instruments is still wrong, I’ll delete all of the minute and tick data for the entire instrument from the db folder, and then restart again. Between those two mitigations, I would say 95%+ of all startup issues are resolved here. I’ve mentioned this on the previous forums including making the suggestion that there be a way to automate flushing the cache or to have an option that it be always cleared at startup but so far that hasn’t happened. Some issues may be specific to certain bar types that NT8 doesn’t handle well in the caching system. It’s hard to tell but I will volunteer that those mitigations I described in most cases resolve issues here.
Migrating to another platform would be a herculean task. I’ve invested much on the platform, transitioning to another platform would painful and would require something like months. I’m trying to get their help on what kind configuration would suffice for what I have. Waiting to hear back from them.
I experienced the same issues from the very moment I upgraded to version 8.1.6, which lead me to immediately revert back to previous version which runs perfectly. So for those having issues with NT8, have you tried reverting back to version 8.1.5.2?
And on that note, I will remain on version 8.1.5.2 until they publish the first patch for the train-wreck they created in 8.1.6. But even then, I will be watching everything under a microscope. And at the very first signs of any trouble I will immediately revert back to 8.1.5.2.
I’m also on 8.0.28 on my dev system. Haven’t had time to upgrade. It isn’t going to be trivial with all that I have going on there. I do have a test laptop for beta testing releases. That one is on 8.1.3 I believe.
I never see a valid reason for being on the latest release that comes out. I stay at least 2-3 releases behind.
For those having issues with 8.1.6, why aren’t you going back to a good known older release?
I looked at the video, and you can see how that can be really frustrating.
You mentioned that you are a user since 2022 and are running this on an Apple MacBook through Parallels. I’d be curious why in this time you haven’t moved over to a dedicated PC Windows machine for trading.
I initially was using VirtualBox on a MacBook because I’ve been in the Apple ecosystem since 2007, but felt it was a challenge to manage the memory and other resources for NT on a Mac. I ended up just building my own PC for $1000 over a year ago, and haven’t had any problems since. Mind you I haven’t upgraded to 8.1.6 yet on my main machine, only on my secondary test laptop.
If you’re not tech-savvy, I’m sure you could purchase a dedicated PC that could handle NinjaTrader for $1000 or less and would be a high probability for a positive return on investment. That said, it is valid to note that other traders have observed issues with NinjaTrader even on a dedicated PC, so there’s no guarantees that this would solve your specific issue.
Sometimes it works, sometimes not. That’s the risk you take.
You cannot blame Ninjatrader for it, as they clearly stated that NT7/8 is a WINDOWS application. This is a Mac problem.
I’ve been using NT8 through a Parallels VM (Win 11 ARM64). As long as I run NT8 version 8.1.5.2 it runs rock solid. I run two workspaces, each containing 8 charts and a super dom. I only give the VM 4 CPU cores and 4 GB of ram. Everything is working great.
And for those interested, specs on the Mac are:
2021 MacBook Pro M1Pro with 16 gb ram.
Yes. on average about 4 indicators on each chart. All of them are custom built indicators of my own creation. One of those is a custom DXY indicator that compiles a USD Index from a complex computation of 5 currency futures. I would say my workspaces are putting a very heavy load on the platform. In fact, I am sort of shocked it performs so well. I had some performance issues using these on TradeStation, and I had about 1/4 the number of charts on TradeStation as I currently use on NT8. And I did not have the custom DXY on TradeStation either.
Edit: Oh yes, one more thing. I also use these in “Coherence mode” (Parallels features). So each individual window of NT8 can be placed on a separate monitor. (I run only two monitors). The user interface is smooth as silk. Not clunky at all and very stable.
I’ll be revisiting my ninjatrader install over the weekend, reviewing dll files and probably moving forward with a fresh install and adding my framework, piece by piece. We’ll see how things go.
Wait… so some people that were arguing with me about 8.1.6 upgrade issues are running it in Parallels? Then complain about issues when upgrading? So you run it in a virtualized environment and expect it to be the same as native Windows? I’m no genius, but have you ever thought it is a virtualized environment issue and not a Ninja Trader issue?
Seriously, if the platform is that important to your day to day operation, then you should just move on. I would start with using Ninja as your platform to view charts (assuming your indicators are all on there, hoping it doesn’t crash on you), trade in a different platform, have a backup chart as you migrate over to a different platform.
