We've been beta testing FXCM's new Strategy Trader automated trading platform for a couple of months now, and after quite a few trials and tribulations we've finally got our trusty first example robot to work successfully on it. FXCM refer to trading systems written for Strategy Trader as "Strategy Advisors", and they are implemented based around bars rather than ticks like MetaTrader 4. That means you really need to run this advisor on a tick chart to stay in the market 100% of the time, like the MT4 version does. We still haven't managed to get that working reliably, but it does seem to run fine on a one minute chart and up. If you'd like to take a look you can download the C# source code from our community forum.
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The beta test version of FXCM's new Strategy Trader platform has been around for several months now, but you used to have to fill in a form and be approved by FXCM before being able to download it and try it out. That's now changed, and FXCM have made it available for download to anyone who visits the brand new Strategy Trader section of their website, along with a video walkthrough about the wonders of what they now describe as:
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Following hot on the heels of the announcement of the Strategy Tester public beta testing program, FXCM are now inviting their clients to sign up for FXCM Labs:
An online research center that grants clients exclusive access to FXCM products and services still in the development stages.
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I've had a live account with London based broker ActivTrades for quite a while now. It's one of their "Standard" MetaTrader 4 accounts. I opened it because it offers micro-lots and lots of exotic currency crosses, along with a wide range of non-forex instruments, including stock indices, gold, oil and other commodities too. That combination is a little hard to come by at other brokers. It is slightly old fashioned however, in that it still uses 4 decimal places and fixed spreads. 2 on the FTSE 100 and 3 on GBP/USD for example, most of the time at least.
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Thanks to yesterday's disappointing Non-farm Payroll numbers the greenback fell and my troublesome sell limit order at European broker ActivTrades finally got filled. Consequently my new Interbank MetaTrader 4 micro-lot account with them is now fully funded, and open for business. As you can imagine, I have had one or two long discussions with ActivTrades over the last couple of days. During the course of those they pointed out to me that enough of their liquidity providers are now willing to quote and fill a 1K trade that it had now proved possible for them to introduce micro-lots on their "Straight Through Processing" (STP for short) MetaTrader Interbank accounts. When I enquired what "enough" meant in this context, the number three was mentioned. Unlike their Standard account, there is no "averaging algorithm" inserted by ActivTrades between you and the banks on their Interbank account. Instead they just add a bit to the spreads they are quoted, since they have to earn a crust somehow just like the rest of us.
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MetaQuotes announced yesterday that from now on the source code for MetaTrader 5 expert advisors written by 3rd parties (such as the Trading Gurus!) will be made available for download through the MT5 client terminal. To celebrate this fact we've rewritten our latest "Really Random Robot" in an object-oriented style, and uploaded it to the MQL5 Code Base. MetaQuotes have already kindly translated the instructions into Russian for us! We're eagerly waiting to discover how many MetaTrader 5 beta testers download it and try it out. So far today we're up to 16.
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After a variety of trials and tribulations along the way the Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, now officially renamed Dodd-Frank after its two sponsors, was finally signed into law by US President Barack Obama on July 21st. According to The Economist magazine:
More on The Countdown Has Begun for the Retail Forex Revolution
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We've recently improved our MetaTrader 4 London Breakout expert advisor, and now we've released a port of that "robot" to MetaTrader 5, using the new object-oriented features of the MQL5 language. You can download the MQL5 source code from our Community forum.
More on Object-Oriented London Breakout Robot Available for MetaTrader 5
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I was browsing around the Boston Technologies website yesterday for a very different reason, when I made an interesting discovery – the Boston Technologies History Center. As we reported recently, the historical data you can download into the MetaTrader 4 History Center seems to have developed some big gaps recently. If you're new to MT4 backtesting, or if you haven't been religiously logging in to your account regularly to keep your data up to date, this might well cause your backtest results to be rather misleading. This problem has affected the backtesting of some members of our Community, and they now have another solution to their difficulties apart from waiting for me to export some of my own data from MetaTrader!
More on Boston Technologies History Center Rescues MetaTrader Backtests
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FXCM have made a couple of announcements recently about new developments they've introduced to make it easier for their customers to start automated trading. First they announced their new Strategy Trader platform with quite a bit of razmatazz, then with rather less fanfare earlier this month they invited their clients to get involved in open beta testing of their new products via FXCM Labs. It's said that these things come in threes, and FXCM have just quietly revealed via the FXCM Labs forum that starting on Monday users of the venerable Trading Station platform will be able to program their own automated trading strategies too.
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