MSN Trader is now live! According to the web site it's "The Investor Platform of the Future". Despite the slightly confusing initial publicity, from 12:00 GMT today there have been over 160 currency pairs available for trading on MSN Trader, as long as you are a UK resident.
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According to Computer Weekly Microsoft will be launching MSN Trader for the benefit of retail traders here in the UK on Wednesday, pasting a white label version of Saxo Bank's WebTrader platform into MSN Money:
More on Microsoft Enters Retail Forex. Launches MSN Trader with Saxo Bank
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Now that yesterday's excitement has died down a bit I had a chance this morning to chat to LMAX in greater detail about their new retail trading platform, recently christened LMAX Trader.
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Ray The Random Robot
Only a few short days ago we took the momentous decision to enter several automated trading competitions simultaneously. We've been burning numerous barrels of midnight oil here at Trading Towers ever since, and for the second time in as many weeks late last night we managed to successfully shoehorn some of the dumbest trading technology ever invented into our old friend Ray the Random Robot™. Then we managed to get him entered into another automated trading contest at the very last moment.
More on Ray the Random Robot Scrapes Into MetaTrader 5 Trading Championship
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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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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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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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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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To celebrate the fact that forex broker Dukascopy have at last officially become a Swiss bank we have rewritten our first example robot to work on their JForex platform. Take a look at the JForex source code on our community forum.
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MetaTrader 5 has been in beta testing by traders around the world for well over 6 months now. In an indication that there might at last be a glimmer of light at the end of the long testing tunnel Alpari UK are now publicising the fact that you can download MetaTrader 5 from their website, and thus open an account with them. It's only a demonstration account at the moment of course. Alpari don't say when a real live MT5 account will be available from them. A few more months yet I suspect. Alpari do say this however:
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