Best platform to build and execute automated trading systems

Hi all,
Please help me with this and I will owe you big times.
I want to find what would be the best platform to go with when it comes to live EA trading. Taking in to following factors, what do you think it the best. Your opinion is valuable to me so don't worry about other opinions put your 2 cents if you can and it means a lot.

1) Reliability - running with minimum bugs and crashes and execute orders as they are suppose to.
2) Language capability - MQL VS C# VS Easy Language VS AFL VS ......
3) Number of supported brokers and easy to connect to brokers.
4) Back testing capability ( if you tell me all these things are not possible under one roof, that's totally ok. Main focus on the above 3 points. I am more than happy to do back testing in a different software)

Here are few choices I have

MT4 , Multicharts , Ninja Trader , Amibroker

I am a .net pro so I love c# . I am slightly reluctant to go with MQL4 as I have heard it has limited capability. Love Amobroker's back testing capabilities but I don't know if it is a good choice for live execution.

Please shed some light on this matter.
Thanks in advance!
Cheers!

I share your view. I started off with Amibroker trading equities and also loved the backtesting functionality of it. I linked it to a separate piece of software (TradeSim) for carrying out Monte Carlo testing on portfolios and found it really helpful and a great combo.

Making the transition to FX was difficult but due to the ability to get hold of free data (through the different brokers) together with the popularity of MT4, I decided to make the switch. I'm still fairly new to MT4 and still getting my head around the language (I am not a programmer by profession) but there are a few things that really annoy me about MT4.

Firstly their constant updates which can (and do) impact on your already written EA code. I'm all in favour of ongoing improvements to a product but it does seem very obvious that the retail traders are not the ones who Metaquotes are aiming to help. But then again, this is a bit understandable considering both software and data are free to retail traders. Personally, I'd rather pay a fee for MT4 if it meant that the product was designed with us traders in mind.

The other point you have already touched on is the backtesting capability of MT4. Compared to the abilities of Amibroker, MT4 capabilities are basic at best!! Getting hold of reliable high quality data is difficult, the speed of testing a strategy is slow (and I run a fast computer with no optimisation occuring) and the output is... well.. basic!! I know there will be many who state that backtesting is of limited use and to some degree I agree with their reasoning. However, I have always found it a great way to initially test an idea in a controlled environment. If anyone can recommend better backtesting software that can be used in parallel with MT4 please let me know!!!

Given how long it has taken me to learn Mql4, I don't want to start again for the third time by learning yet another language. Trading is afterall meant to be about technical and fundamental skills not programming skills!! So I think at this stage I am stuck with MT4 unless I can find something truly amazing in all aspects of strategy development/testing & trading that makes the move again worth it.

CCH

Thanks heaps Chorlton! Can I ask, is it possible to use Amibroker as a live trading platform? A better platform to use parallel with MT4 for testing is yet to be found/built.

Also what would be a good place to learn Amibroker Formula Language?

Thanks again!
Cheers!

I traded longer term with equities. I would download the data each day and trade based on the signals provided by my system. The orders were placed manually with my broker. Hence I can't really comment on the auto trading side. In terms of learning AFL, it was a case of reading the manual, reading forums and using some starting code provided by a programmer to understand the syntax, structure etc.

CCH

cAlgo