NinjaTrader is my favorite strategy backtesting platform. Kinetick works great and is an important part of why I use NinjaTrader – the historical data service makes it so easy to find reliable price history for many instruments.

Collecting good market data poses one of the biggest problems to a systems trader. As I always like to point out, GIGO: garbage in, garbage out. It doesn’t do any good to backtest a strategy on junk price histories.

The same company that owns NinjaTrader also owns Kinetick. It’s no coincidence that the only natively supported data provider is a sister company.

That relationship might lead one to believe that the downloading speed of Kinetick would run fastest inside of NinjaTrader. One would be wrong.

I heard a number of traders complain last week at the Trade Empowered summit about Kinetick’s download speeds. It takes a long time for Kinetick to load historical data, regardless of whether its forex or equities data. Jason, a trader that I befriended, jumped into the conversation with a nice trick that he learned. It’s worthy of sharing with everyone.

Use Kinetick with IQFeed

IQFeed accepts the user name and password for live Kinetick accounts. That in itself isn’t very noteworthy.

What’s important is that IQFeed runs many times faster than Kinetick. If you have a live Kinetick account, download IQFeed onto your computer. Complete the installation process by running the .exe file.

Create a new account connection in NinjaTrader. Instead of selecting Kinetick, select IQFeed. Push next.

Create a new IQFeed connection in NinjaTrader 7

The new screen asks for your IQFeed user details. You don’t have any because you subscribe to Kinetick. That’s ok! Enter in your Kinetick details anyway.

Enter your Kinetick account information into the IQFeed connection screen.

Name the connection something that you’ll remember. I called mine KinetickIQ.

Now go to the Control Center. Select File \ Connect \ KinetickIQ. When the connection loads, IQFeed will connect using the Kinetick account information.

The download speeds magically run several times faster than connecting directly to Kinetick. I have no idea why this is, but it’s a cool trick if you’re in a hurry to downloads reams of price data.

Did this help you out? Please leave comments in the section below.