Ninja for MAC

[phreaxer]

Remember: mac users look to see what platforms they can use for trading before they sign up. The only mac users willing to run virtual PCs to run Ninja Traders are the more technical computer users. My guess is that Ninja Trader are probably losing out on 80% of mac users. That is why you don't hear much from mac users here. It's not because of lack of mac users in the market. It's because most mac users in the market found another platform that had a macOS version.

That's spot on. I downloaded a parallel or something (not really the tech-savvy type) and it failed to install/run so I gave up and went with Ameritrade instead. Not as highly regarded as NT, but at least it didn't require me recreating my HDD/OS

[trevor14]

I’d like to cast my vote for Mac compatibility as well. I’ve been running NT on Parallels but it’s not the smoothest experience. I also bought a Windows machine to trade on and really hated the OS and hardware, so Mac it is for me. I guess all I can hope for is compatibility when the .Net 5 framework comes out?

[nosliwpt]

Please,NT for Mac.

[reevers]

I want to add my voice to this Mac debate.
Why has Windows got a 77.9% marketshare and Mac 13%? Well that is because the PC has always been the cheap option, businesses didn't see any sense paying twice as much for the Mac when a cheap PC would do the job, such as bookkeeping, spreadsheet work, emails and internet, this is how Microsoft Office and Excel etc became the standard for this type of work. I have worked on Macs for 30 years and owned PCs too, owning a PC was a trial, forever crashing and being unstable generally, the standard of build was always junky, though I am sure that this has changed for the better in recent years, the Mac on the other hand has been stable throughout and well built, I always maintained that although the Mac was dearer initially the PC always ended up more expensive due to all the downtime encountered by breakdowns in software and hardware (and stress).

Anyway I have been using a competitor (Windows) charting software in Parallels which has performed without issue for the last 4 months and the only reason I have come to NT is because I have bought into a trading strategy that is based on NT and I am pulling my hair out with constant crashing, so bad that it is unusable. I do not like to be using Parallels anyway for any software and a native Mac program would be a godsend. Rather than assuming that Mac users are not interested in trading I would be encouraged to view it as an un-tapped market because not only is the native Mac operating system is very stable and slick but a growing number of people are choosing Mac because it fits into their life better.

[juanr347]

I can't believe NT still does not support the Mac!!!!

[SAC-MAN]

Hi everyone, I would like to make my vote for a Mac edition as well! Yes there are more windows users but there are also a lot of Mac users and more and more everyday.

[xabcdtrading]

Most of you guys on a Mac can be up and running in under an hour pretty easily.. Did this tutorial to show you how to run your nt8 on a Mac... https://youtu.be/nRFp_MUQbEk

[SAC-MAN]

Thanks for the video xabcdtrading I did watch it and almost went that way. However I don't have the most modern Macbook and I remembered the pains I had using parallels in the past just for simple apps like word and excel. So I decided to load windows on an external SSD and boot from there so that all my system resources can be used when running windows. I followed this video which was a great help setting it up.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3IhW722IMwE&t=733s

[xabcdtrading]

SAC-MAN for sure, dual booting is a solution and glad you found it worked for you. Some that read this thread though might want to continue to use their mac programs at the same time as run their ninjatrader and I guess that's where my video might be more useful. We've heard tons of problems with our users using parallels as it seems to have a lot of stability issues with any sort of load. But have not heard that with the vmware software. I read an article a few years ago that their virtualization overhead was something around 3% and if the host was using more than that it was a misconfiguration of a VM... so I think for a lot of people the overhead of 3% would be considered acceptable, but if you choose that way or dual booting then it gets the job done. Pretty simple solutions available for those wanting to run NT8 on a mac and glad to hear you got it working for you.

Editing post with performance doc: https://www.vmware.com/pdf/hypervisor_performance.pdf so virtualization overhead on the host machine is 2% for the ESX solution - so for fusion I doubt it's much different for anyone that is curious.

[deeje]

Greetings!
I would like to vote +1 for a native MAC solution. I'm using VMware fusion and that solution is fine. It was less than ideal to purchase a windows license to get it working. As a software developer, i'm a MAC user and will be for my development career so i'll always be in the +1 camp. It's not a deal breaker or anything for me but when recommending this platform to others that is a drawback.

[SAC-MAN]

xabcdtrading Thanks for the reply I really appreciate it, maybe i'll give your way a go as well and see how well it works.

[SAC-MAN]

xabcdtrading Hi I have a quick question for you. You said in a reply above that VM ware only uses 3% overhead. That would be acceptable, but Iam assuming to run Ninjatrader8 you will also be running Windows 10. So you'd be running macOS, VMware, Windows 10 and then Ninjatrader8? Is that correct? Or does VMware work differently? If not then MacOS, Windows 10 and VMware would add a lot of overhead just to run Ninjatrader8?

If you could let me know your thoughts I would appreciate it.

[Wessel]

Yes that's correct. You run Windows 10 inside the VM, an inside Windows 10 you run Ninjatrader 8.
It works fine, a lot of mac users use it this way. You can also use parrallels it doesn't make any difference.
Good news is you can run both VMWare and Parrallels in "integration mode. That would mean you see all the windows of your NInjatrader just like it was a normal OsX application.
Or you can choose to run full screen windows, in that case you would just sit behind a windows machine.

xabcdtrading Hi I have a quick question for you. You said in a reply above that VM ware only uses 3% overhead. That would be acceptable, but Iam assuming to run Ninjatrader8 you will also be running Windows 10. So you'd be running macOS, VMware, Windows 10 and then Ninjatrader8? Is that correct? Or does VMware work differently? If not then MacOS, Windows 10 and VMware would add a lot of overhead just to run Ninjatrader8?

If you could let me know your thoughts I would appreciate it.

[xabcdtrading]

xabcdtrading Hi I have a quick question for you. You said in a reply above that VM ware only uses 3% overhead. That would be acceptable, but Iam assuming to run Ninjatrader8 you will also be running Windows 10. So you'd be running macOS, VMware, Windows 10 and then Ninjatrader8? Is that correct? Or does VMware work differently? If not then MacOS, Windows 10 and VMware would add a lot of overhead just to run Ninjatrader8?

If you could let me know your thoughts I would appreciate it.

Hello, sorry for the delayed response.... but the 3% is onto of the resources you allocate to the VM. Eg. If you give 8GB of ram to the VM then your system is really going to use around 8GB + 3% etc. But just to make things even more confusing, you're reserving the 8GB to that VM but the resources are shared between the host and the vm. So even if you allocate 8GB to the VM it will only use what is needed + the 3%.

[xabcdtrading]

You can also use parrallels it doesn't make any difference.

I'd agree with 99% of what you mentioned but just wanted to add onto this one... we have a pretty large community of traders that have provided us their feedback on running NT8 on a mac... using basic functions of NinjaTrader doesn't have any issues with parallels, however we have gotten quite a lot of feedback that when there is "load" under your NT8 and doing more heavy tasks, parrallels causes a lot of stability issues. I have not looked into doing any RCA on why, but when they use fusion as an alternative the issue goes way. So we tell people to avoid the headache and just start with vmware fusion. Just thought i'd add this for anyone else that might read the thread.