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[born2bemild]

Have held an ESL Financial license for over 5 years. It's amazing to compare the first iterations (ver 1.9 for me) to today's 7.4 and 64-bit 8.beta. It has been a pleasure to be part of this substantial acceleration. There were undoubtedly bumps and hassles in the very early years, but is that really uncommon? It has matured into a very stable/robust state. As an American trained engineer in a previous life, the one thing I truly admire about the British counterpart is their ability to cut to the chase and get it done in as few relevant steps as possible. It is of little surprise Wall St draws heavily from talent in this region to develop their custom execution/coalesce platforms. MC developers (Great Britain) are sharp and understand the term hustle. You'll be hard-pressed to find faster turn-around times at retail level. I'm frequently tinkering with new software/broker api's. Over the years, I simply have never been out of click's reach from ESL Financial for charting & partial backtest research.
Alongside ESL, use Matlab/Scypi for more involved analysis/brain-storming, IB execution & API, TT x_trader pro rt data & execution (just switched over from CQG Trader), MarketDelta MP, and IQFeed rt data. Trade us/euro index & currency futures.

Currently run ESL DT 7.4 on Win Pro 7 64-bit w/o issue. Since ESL is efficiently multi-threaded, it rockets on a dual xeon e5645@3.5g/evga sr-2/Intel 510 SSD to say the least. You will be quite satisfied using chips such as Intel 3930k/2600k if you plan to heavily test. Like most soft, I always wait at least a month to adopt the latest full-release. Very much looking forward to 8.x 64-bit final.

ESL, please keep pushing the envelope. Critical mass is moving steadily in your direction. Wholeheartedly recommend.

[fasttrader]

Interesting post, thought you were referring to NYSE:ESL. I'm a big Sierra Chart fan myself but always open for advancements, you're based in L.A also, where's the best place to find more on ESL Financial?

[born2bemild]

Originally Posted by fasttrader Interesting post, thought you were referring to NYSE:ESL. I'm a big Sierra Chart fan myself but always open for advancements, you're based in L.A also, where's the best place to find more on ESL Financial?

Hi Fasttrader, ESL Financial is global, I think they originated as a British Company but obviously are located here in the States as well. Best bet to research online, I think they have a website which is more of a marketing setup but best to contact them direct.

[Invest Ed]

Originally Posted by born2bemild Hi Fasttrader, ESL Financial is global, I think they originated as a British Company but obviously are located here in the States as well. Best bet to research online, I think they have a website which is more of a marketing setup but best to contact them direct.

I use Esl Financial in Australia to trade the ASX. I must be on a different system to you guys, mine is pretty basic. You click a few icons, it does the sums and lets you know if you need to sell any shares and then you take the top one from the daily list to replace the ones you sell. I actaully love the fact it's basic that's why i opted for Esl Financial in the first place. I would rather less work and a steady monthly return with no stress than having to work it all out myself. If there are any tips you guys have i would still be interested to hear though. My returns are very high compared to managed funds and other investments but i'm always happy to make more money

[born2bemild]

Originally Posted by Invest Ed I use Esl Financial in Australia to trade the ASX. I must be on a different system to you guys, mine is pretty basic. You click a few icons, it does the sums and lets you know if you need to sell any shares and then you take the top one from the daily list to replace the ones you sell. I actaully love the fact it's basic that's why i opted for Esl Financial in the first place. I would rather less work and a steady monthly return with no stress than having to work it all out myself. If there are any tips you guys have i would still be interested to hear though. My returns are very high compared to managed funds and other investments but i'm always happy to make more money

Hi Invest Ed,

Not sure if you're in the right place. I know that ESL does a basic package for novice investors. If this is correct for what you have then you're best just following that system, it's consistent and great for making a few thousand a week, but if you ever want to trade for a living and work in the millions you'll need to upgrade to something a little more sophisticated. If its the same speak to ESL about version 4.5 real-time for a good stepping stone in to full time trading when you're ready. All the best.

On another note fasttrader, Sierra Chart is a good software. In my experience it was a bit frustrating at first, I couldn't remember how to access features and all but once past that point it's all good.

I'm using the scripting language and have never found any real bugs. I had difficulties that an experienced C programmer might not have had but I find that it's easier to code up an indicator with C and the the ESL ACSIL language than with EZ Language... The chart trader interface works fine with IB's API, the charts have a zillion features and ways to format things, fortunately the customizable Tool Bar can make things very easy. After one gets into a routine and has their favorite subset of actions sorted out, they can be accessed by one click on the tool bar.

I found with Sierra Chart that the backtesting is weak, it's done by replaying data, not that that is a bad thing but there are tradeoffs between the way you code your script, the speed at which you replay and accuracy. That can only all be sorted out by trial and error afaik. If I have the need to do some monstrous backtesting with a huge parameter space I go with Openquant, it's far more optimized for that but Sierrachart is far more optimized for trading from the screen with the use of drawing tools and indicators...

It's nice to work in an environment that is sort of designed to assist one in finding the "elegant" solutions, I can't find a better way to describe how things have gone than that...