I’m using Sierra Chart right now, but until I found some full time traders to talk to I have never heard of it at all. They don’t seem to do any marketing, no advertising, no sales of any kind. Mostly all I see is people using Ninja, or Tradeovate, or Robinhood/Webull, crap like that. Oh or tradingview. Is Sierra only used by pros? And I can sort of see why. It’s a beast. And there isn’t a good tutorial that comes with it or anything so your really on your own.
Who else here uses Sierra and how did you find out about it? And how long did it take you to get good with it?
I had a similar introduction to Sierra. I first learned of its existence about 5 years ago when I was introduced to futures. I opened a brokerage account with TransACT and at that time, they offered a free Sierra Chart license with the account. I didn’t do much with it frankly, I was heavily “invested” in the TradeStation platform at the time (which I now see was terrible but I didn’t understand why at the time!). I played around with Sierra a bit, but yeah… it was such a monster to try and figure out, the documentation was really hard to get through, no tutorials, etc. Fortunately the broker had made a ton of tutorials on Sierra and held regular webinars. I think those videos are even still on Youtube. So I sort of figured out the basics.
It really wasn’t until I joined TRG that I got heavy into Sierra. But once I got “over the hump”, there was no looking back and I won’t use anything else now unless I have no choice. I’ve tried trading with Rithmic R-Trader’s DOMs but they were terrible! SC is a strange company, they don’t seem to really care if their software is well known or not. Maybe they all trade also and make money that way? I dunno. But it seems to be word-of-mouth only.
So yeah, mostly trial & error. And asking lots, and lots of questions. Lots of help from other users who had come before me, and now I help out the new ones who have come after, as much as I can.
