cTrader and other Platforms - Great UX and Great C# Architecture

Team,

I won't hide that I wanted to leave cTrader for the lack of advanced features. However, here is my journey in 8 days touring other C# platforms. I won't mention names for trademark and legal reasons, but I will leave it for your imagination to discover the names:

1 - Platform 1: A trading platform that has two languages, one is their own, and the other is C#. It costs around $2K with their advanced tools, but usually discounts to 50%. One month trial.

They have easy-to-use product but it looks like they have focused on their proprietary language and left the C# platform with less focus.

The C# architecture is not cohesive, full of poor programming practices, and follows the C++ code convention. They have advanced testing tools like portfolio testing and walk-forward testing. Unfortunately, cTrader doesn't have this, not even paid!

2 - Platform 2: A trading platform that uses solely C# for algo trading. Retails at around $1500, but usually discounted to $1000, free for non-live trading. It is a very popular platform.

User experience is awful, colour scheme and application UI are from the 90s, you get random errors (errors are pure non-user friendly errors, like Object not set to an instance message box when you right click on something).

They use their lousy editor for C# and it requires a bit of hacking to work with Visual Studio.

The architecture code to implement your algo is slightly better than Platform 1, but it is still chatty and can be done in a cleaner way.

3 - Platform 3: Open source C# trading platform, mainly addressed at algo trading and doesn't support discretionary. Free to download the source code, however, you will have the host your algo code on their platform to run, so they will have access to your IP, although their T&C says that they will not access it, but it is up to you to trust this. It is also fiddly to publish and see your indicator.

In general, although they claim it is used by hedge funds and others, I still feel it is not suitable for a serious algo trader.

4 - cTrader! User friendly UI with modern colour scheme and modern way of update to latest version. Good UX where you can learn the product without reading its documentation (other outdated platforms think that, in 2020, you need to read the documentation to operate the product), Free for live (ok, you pay the fees elsewhere!), gives you the data locally to backtest.

Most important to me, as a C# software architect who is specialised in quant finance, is that the C# code, although using an outdated version of .NET, is well thought of, every class! I trust that there is a huge effort put by the technical architects and the developers at Spotware to make it that intuitive. They absorbed the complexity at their end and did not pass it on to the algo developers.

However, this is lacking plenty of free OR paid backtesting features and tools (more options for the backtesting and forward-walk and portfolio tests). It looks like Spotware style is to do small but steady steps.

Ladies and gents working on developing cTrader, I value your effort in building the system and after touring the other systems, I can tell you from an outsider's perspective that you are doing great work, keep it up.

Happy holidays everyone from London.