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.
Filed under Trading Platforms by 
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
Filed under Trading Platforms by
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.
Needless to say we've also fired up the MetaTrader 5 strategy tester and run a couple of backtests. This sort of strategy is traditionally supposed to work best with Cable, but that's not what our initial tests show. Here's the backtested equity curve using the default input settings for GBP/USD:
More on Object-Oriented London Breakout Robot Available for MetaTrader 5
Filed under Trading Systems by
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:
Dodd-Frank is riddled with messy compromises.
not least of which is:
There are some glaring omissions. There [is no] meaningful tidying-up of the tangle of federal regulatory agencies.
and there is also:
A nonsensical compromise to allow Senator Blanche Lincoln, author of a proposal to force banks to spin [banks’ swaps desks] off, to save face. Interest-rate, foreign exchange and high-quality credit swaps can be retained.
So the banks that caused the financial crisis will still be able to deal in forex and swaps thereon, but what about the beleaguered retail forex trader? Section 742 of the act (although it doesn't say this in so many words!) leaves that side of things to the tender mercies of the CFTC:
More on The Countdown Has Begun for the Retail Forex Revolution
Filed under Regulation by
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.
Now you might well be asking yourselves at this point:
What on Earth is the point of an automated trading system that simply simulates tossing a coin at the earliest opportunity when deciding when and in which direction to enter the market?
Well the first reason is that it demonstrates a framework for building more complicated "robots", but in the simplest way possible. The second reason is that we think it is actually worth spending a lot of time investigating the performance of trading systems that include some element of randomness in their design. You can learn a lot about the way markets work, and the way "robots" work, by pondering the question "Why?" long and hard. For example:
Why does an extremely dumb trading system that uses the toss of a coin for entries make a profit in some circumstances?
Filed under Trading Systems by
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.
Swiss bank Dukascopy have been providing ECN micro-lots direct to retail clients since the start of this year, although they don't call them that, and what's more they don't provide them via MetaTrader either. ECN stands for "Electronic Communication Network", and such an account allows you to place your orders inside the currently quoted spread, if you so wish.
Filed under Brokers by
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.
Recently ActivTrades announced that they were now offering micro-lots on their "Interbank" accounts as well. These use variable spreads with 5 DPs, so I opened one of them too. I haven't funded it yet, because I was waiting for a long standing EUR/USD trade on my Standard account to take profits before transferring some cash over to the new account.
My take profit order is (still!) a sell limit at 1.3260. The high bid price on my ActivTrades Interbank account yesterday was 1.32613. That account is still not funded. My take profit order on my ActivTrades Standard account never got filled. Why on Earth not you may well be asking yourself. I asked ActivTrades that very question yesterday but by this evening I still hadn't received an answer, so I called their London number.
Filed under Brokers by
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.
The primary goal of FXCM Labs is to enhance product development by leveraging FXCM’s greatest asset—its clients. Who better to determine the value of products and the improvements or modifications they might require than the traders that are going to be depending on them every day? Using client feedback collected from FXCM Labs beta test groups, product developers can implement the changes needed to continue delivering the very best technologies the retail forex trading industry has to offer.
Filed under Trading Platforms by
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:
The Next Evolution in Automated Forex Trading – An all-in-one automated trading solution, allowing you to code, backtest, optimise and trade from one platform.
This is still the beta test version remember. Personally I wouldn't even dream of letting an automated Strategy Advisor loose on a live account with it at the moment. However if you want to experiment with it on a demo account now is your chance. By the way, FXCM seem to have rebranded what used to be called Strategy Advisors. They are now referred to as Strategy Trader EAs, or stEAs for short. Presumably the EA is supposed to stand for Expert Advisor, just like in MetaTrader?
Filed under Trading Platforms by
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.
Once you drag an SA onto a chart in Strategy Trader it visually backtests your system for you immediately. You can then take a look at a large variety of reports, and also export all the results to a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet for further analysis, if so desired. Here's an equity curve we produced for our shiny new random entry robot on a 5 minute chart for EUR/USD from January 3rd 2010 to date:
Filed under Trading Systems by
Recent Comments