Incorporating other software with NinjaTrader? Options & News

[ChainsawDR]

I’ve been using Ninjatrader for a couple of years now and overall I’ve been very happy with the software. I use it entirely algorithmically (I have a day job that isn’t trading so I’ve needed a system that I can set-off and leave alone all day). I’m now running up against two limitations, so hoping to ask if the community here has used any workarounds to overcome them (want to avoid looking at other platforms if I can).

Automated trading of Options.
Currently NinjaTrader can’t trade options in an automated manner. Today I’m buying/selling the underlying equity stock then try to manually buy an option. Most often I’m not by the computer so this doesn’t work out. I’m wondering if there is any workaround that anyone has tried? I’m thinking of perhaps writing to a text file from NinjaTrader and having another program monitor it, then buy the option via that program (likely a custom program that buys via the interactive brokers API).

News trading.
I want to start analyzing news events and parsing for sentiment or even presence of specific keywords and phrases (eg “gained FDA approval”) and incorporate it into my algorithm. The problem is that NinjaTrader only has two sources for real-time news: kinetic and iqfeed. While I have a data feed from iqfeed, the news options aren’t great (not the best sources, and they have a lot of latency vs ‘proper’ news feeds like Bloomberg or Dow Jones news). Has anyone found any workarounds for integrating alternative news feeds into their algorithms?

Again I’m thinking of perhaps having a separate program for parsing high quality news feeds, and dropping updates into a text file that NinjaTrader monitors.

If anyone has had any joy extending beyond NinjaTrader in either space I’d love to hear how you did it.

Thanks in advance

ChainsawDR

[QuantKey_Bruce]

I do some of these same things and have for years - communicating extensively between NinjaTrader and an external desktop application that talks to Interactive Brokers. Besides using a file to pass information back and forth, you could consider shared memory or named pipes or several other approaches. Beyond all that, you could talk to IB straight from a NinjaTrader add-on - whether you do that probably depends on whether you need the IB connection to survive an NT restart or whether you need it to talk to other things besides NT. Whether a file is best sort of depends on the maximum latency you require - my advice to you is to prototype it the simple way (which is probably a file to start with) and only do something more complicated when you have your final design and you have proven that what you are trying to do is likely to work. What you don't want to do is spend a long time on architecture if the actual trading isn't working. Take it in stages.

Remember that behind the curtain, the IB API is opening a TCP/IP connection to a Java program running on your computer listening on a port on 127.0.0.1, and that Java program is opening a second TCP/IP connection to their server. So, your file is only one of a series of hand-offs that occur with each message going either direction.

[ChainsawDR]

Thanks Bruce! That’s super helpful to know others are doing these things successfully, and your advice on testing into it is well received. May I ask, is the other desktop application you are using involving off-the-shelf software or is it custom made? (Wondering if there’s existing applications that extend ninjatrader without having to go down the custom path).

[QuantKey_Bruce]

It's custom-made. But I'm sure there are probably some things for sale - I've never looked.