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the answer really depends on needs, abilities, and what the software is going to be used for. none are necessarily 'better' just different with areas of strengths, and weaknesses. tradestation's strengths: tons of data, a large user group with add on products and programmers, lots of built in strategies/indicators to use as a base, good charting, relatively easy to program, etc weaknesses: doesn't time stamp tick data, expensive if you're not a client, and a very big one, lack of portfolio testing. neoticker can do things that tradestation simply can't do, however, it takes much more time to program things, has bugs here and there, is difficult to learn etc, have not used ninjatrader, but it has some strengths the others don't, free to use until you are automated, lots of broker connections, decent user base, etc, i use neoticker and tradestation at the moment, but must employ a programmer for the former. hope this helps.

mark katsanos wrote a book called "intermarket trading strategies," and the ES pretty much leads everything during normal hours (he uses lagged correlation studies). however, overnight, the FESX leads the ES and he has a strategy built for it using a 15 minute time frames. on the downside, it trades very infrequently, it needs tweaking and optimizing, and i couldn't really get very good results. i confess i didn't work very hard on it because it's mathematically and indicator based, and a little over my head. on the upside, the entries look pretty good when looking at a chart and his lead lag work is very sound. most of the book is geared towards longer term trading, but is very good and interesting (like using gold miners to forecast the direction of gold). the lead lag relationship studies alone are worth the price, especially if you have your own divergence model. i have the book in front of me and here are a few notes: some of the components FESX/ES are linear regression divergence, a congestion index (as opposed to the ADX), intermarket momentum indicator, stochastics, and macd. it basically looks for a divergence, and alters between mean reversion (stochastics) and trend following trades (macd). personally, have never used technical indicators in my day trading career, tried using them in systems, but am finding i'm not comfortable with them in trying to develop systems. http://http://www.amazon.com/Intermarket-Trading-Strategies-Wiley/dp/0470758104 how could one someone build a strategy based on the the FESX-ES overnight lead lag relationship using just range based analysis would be something i would love to hear about

many people look for price to diverge from the tick, money flow, up/down volume, trin, as a way to use this data. have an idea about how to go about this, and look forward to learning other ways to use this data from this thread. thx

perhaps one could use CCI divergence indicators as shown in some fashion? http://www.trading-naked.com/CCI-nicktrader_on_no_price_cci_diver.htm

any ideas of how one could quantify a divergence such as this? divergence using MACD has been talked about as being a good signal, but haven't seen any results quantified. have been pondering how one would work with a programmer to have divergence between price and other equity specific internal information used as an automated strategy, but not sure how to go about it. other ideas welcomed