indeed. it's been tradingview.com and recently sierra chart as well, which was recommended by my new broker. i don't know why, but on their website they only mention Multichart to connect to their servers, but honestly, i eventually got pissed off with some of the MC UI features as it would slow me down. also, different charting packages come with a different set of technical indicators and in this case sierra chart is more complete than MC. to be fair, one can find user created scripts online (not always free) for those missing technicals but again, same issue as with MT4: how do we know the technical indicator was programmed properly if there isn't a vendor standing behind it to vouch for its quality? personally i don't have time to mess around with scripts and a platform's idiosyncrasies just to debug some code that should already be guaranteed to work. but mess i did, and there are a few weird hiccups with MC at times that just make you realize it is not worth the time.
surprisingly, it's the same company that does tradingview.com, and that app is just awesome from a UI/UX perspective. now if they could only make it a little bit more responsive and improve the data feed, it'd be perfect.
before i forget, there's an Austrian company that makes a charting app called TeleTrader. i haven't tried it yet, but what caught my eye is that it comes with an exhaustive number of technical indicators, more than sierra chart, especially it has the MESA indicator created by john ehler, which i believe is a paying package on eSignal. and based on their description, you can easily drag and drop technical indicators around a chart, from the indicator's dedicated window region drop it onto the main price chart (tradingview.com does that too), or even feed one indicator into another one as input very easily and straightforwardly. the latter feature i like a lot: as an example: RSI input to Stochastic gives you the StochRSI. with sierra, in the indicator selection dialog window, you can specify whether you want the price to be the main input to the indicator or some other indicator, all with a click of the mouse. that's more user friendly.
as to your last question, i will answer it by recasting the issue. if i want to trade, i need to see what is relevant. some charting apps come with some built-in tools/functionality that let's you filter the noise from the relevant data more than other apps. it could be something just as simple as displaying graphs and price action more clearly, which is the case of tradingview.com--for example, we all know that we shouldn't have like 10 indicators/overlays going all at once on the same chart because it becomes next to impossible to see anything in the tangle of squiggly lines. but let's say that all these 10 indicators are filtering for different features of the price action and it would be nice to be able to switch quickly between one set of filter to another in the middle of fast and furious (sorry, couldn't help it
) action.
well, with MT4 the procedure would be terribly cumbersome: you either would have to clear the chart by deleting some, and re-applying the other indicators that belong to another set, or just have as many charts with the same time frame as you have sets of indicators you want to display; or remove/re-apply templates. just not an elegant solution and wasting additional CPU/RAM resources.
but with tradingview.com all you have to do is decide how many time frames you need, create one single template that remembers all the technical indicators you want attached to your charts, apply it to all the charts, and when looking at the chart you can simply make all the indicators that you don't need at that moment invisible by simply clicking on the 'eye' icon next to the indicator's name. that will toggle the indicator on/off in no time. it takes only one click, no matter how crazy price action is at the time. it's a great feature: fast and easy. no right clicking, navigating submenus, and so on: just one click and you are done. great for newbies whose hand might be shaking if market decided to suddenly go wild at the time.
also, all indicator values are computed in the cloud, so you do not run in the stupid issue that plagues MT4 of having too many scripts running on your local machine uselessly burning up precious CPU cycles (especially considering that their scripting engine is crap compared to Google's V8 Javascript engine).
so to give an example of a set up with tradingview.com, lest some of you think i completely lost it because i mentioned 10 indicators. sometimes, say, i want to check where the price is at relative to the standard deviation--so i hide everything, and make the bollinger bands visible, then hide them again if i don't need them. or i toggle some key MAs on and off. toggle the fib retracements on/off, or the pivots points, or the highs/lows, etc... i can therefore customize my view of the market with a repertoire of filters as the situation requires. BUT i never have more than 2 or 3 indicators on at the same time (if we don't count fib retracements/projections).
you can do that too with sierra but it is not as user friendly as you would have to call up a dialog window, select the indicator, click 'hide', and then dismiss the dialog. 4 steps instead of 1.
also, the other thing i don't like about sierra is that there are way too many menu options and you can get lost in there real easy. also the DOM overlayed on the chart doesn't scale well and is pretty much useless. so you have to bring it up in its own window, which works fine as in any other platform, and since Sierra talks FIX, you can see the book 20 levels deep if that's what you want.
sierra also let's you trade direct from the chart, quickly and easily: you can customize the right click menu to list a plethora of different order types; order sizes can also be preconfigured in advance; OCO, TTOs or bracket orders can be pre-configured to automatically attach themselves to your main market or limit order so all you have to do is click one order type, your order gets processed all set up properly with SL and TP set at desired and preset offsets that you would have specified well in advance of the trading session so that in the heat of the moment you do not need to mess around with this or that button. set, click, and forget. and no need to attach some ridiculous script to enable any of this functionality as it is built-in. as it should be. (take that MT4.)
the result of all this is that tradingview.com and sierra chart used together give me not only a redundant solution, but also allow me to refine my system further to let me see the market in a whole new light (special thanks to sierra for that actually as it provides a set of indicators that when combined (only 3), well... let's just say it works beautifully).
hope this helps... ok back to trading... ain't got all day after all. ;-)
So which one/s did you switch to? TradingView and Sierra? if yes, how do you like them so far?
In what way did your trading improve after leaving MT4 behind?
