NT and Interactive Brokers data - howto?

[jhmax]

I'm getting back to spot FX intraday trading (nothing else, just GBPUSD and EURUSD) after years out. I want to keep my trading platform as light and compact as possible for simplicity. I'll be trading an account on IB's ECN, using trade management software that will only run on NT7, so:

Q1: It looks like I have to use NT7 with the full IB TWS client, as IB's lightweight Gateway only works with NT8 - is that correct?

I'll do lots of simulated trading on real historical data before trading for real. Years ago I established that proprietary data feeds (eg Kinetic), or data from other ECNs than IB, display different enough instantaneous prices to IB's in-house ECN that I wouldn't use them for live intraday trading. However, as we're talking about differences of a fraction of a pip over periods of seconds, non IB historical data should be fine for simulated trading - e.g. Market Replay Data (M.R.D. below). So...

Q2: Can I set up NT to run my Simulated trading account on M.R.D. data up to say yesterday, and my Live trading account using IB's ECN data feed? Or does having two sets of saved price data for the same date and instruments mess things up ? I'd prefer to continue to do simulator practice trades even after I start doing real trades again. How would you arrange this, and can I do it in a way that uses as little of IB's TWS as possible?

Thanks, Max

[NinjaTrader_Zachary]

Hello Max,

Thank you for your post.

1. Correct, the only supported way to connect to Interactive Brokers in NinjaTrader 7 is with the build of TWS outlined in our connection guide, which may be found at the link below;

https://ninjatrader.com/ConnectionGuides/Interactive-Brokers-Connection-Guide

2. You would not be able to simultaneously load market replay data and Interactive Brokers real-time data. Loading market replay data requires a connection to the Market Replay Connection, and you may not connect to both the Market Replay Connection and a secondary connection at the same time. With that said, it is possible to import historical data from .txt files within NinjaTrader 7.

https://ninjatrader.com/support/helpGuides/nt7/?importing.htm