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.
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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.
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.
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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:
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?
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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.
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:
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FXCM started public beta testing of their new Strategy Trader trading platform back in March. They are positioning their new platform as a superior alternative to MetaTrader 4 and the forthcoming MetaTrader 5. They describe it as:
The Next Evolution in Automated Trading – A Free Institutional Grade Platform [including] historical data, advanced back-testing and integrated execution.
and highlight its advantages over MT4 as follows:
FXCM has developed an automated trading platform that is fully geared for No Dealing Desk execution. By removing the need for 3rd party bridges, Strategy Trader can provide faster and more efficient execution than alternative automated platforms like MetaTrader 4.
FXCM invited us to start beta testing Strategy Trader some time ago, and our own tests suggest it still has some way to go before it can be let loose with real money as a "Retail Grade" automated trading platform, let alone "Institutional Grade". Mind you that same verdict applies to MetaTrader 5 also, which has already been in public beta testing for over 9 months!
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A recent addition to the ranks of UK forex brokers has finally delivered something we've been waiting to see for a long time now here at the Trading Gurus. If you are a UK resident it is now possible to spread bet using MetaTrader 4 as your trading platform. You can now therefore use an MT4 expert advisor to automate your tax free forex trading, if you are so inclined.
Not just forex trading either, since Smart Live Markets offer a long list of other instruments apart from currencies, including indices, shares, gold and oil. Their fixed spreads look competitive too. 1 on the FTSE 100, 2 on GBP/USD. Even if you're not a UK resident you can trade those instruments and spreads too, since Smart Live also offer spot forex/CFD accounts as well. That's the good news, so what about the bad news?
More on Smart Live Markets Marry MetaTrader and Spread Betting
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The National Futures Association have made a couple of announcements recently that strongly suggest the number of US spot forex brokers and their associated introducing brokers are going to decline even further in the near future. Last week the NFA implied that the proposed new CFTC regulations about forex IBs are going to be implemented much as originally drafted. They pointed out that:
One component of the proposed rules requires all forex introducing brokers, account managers and pool operators to register with the CFTC as forex IBs, CTAs and CPOs and to become Members of National Futures Association (NFA).
In anticipation of the publication of the CFTC's final rules, NFA will be offering registration/compliance workshops in conjunction with the upcoming Futures and Forex Expo. These workshops will outline the registration process and discuss regulatory requirements for each registration category.
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One of the drawbacks of MetaTrader 4 has always been that whilst you can write a multi-currency expert advisor for the platform, the MT4 strategy tester only allows you to backtest one currency at a time. Now that the bugs in the MetaTrader 5 strategy tester are gradually being removed, we're just starting to use it for some serious testing.
In particular, since MT5 finally allows you to backtest multi-currency EAs, we've created a multi-currency version of our moving average crossover trading system. If you would like to experiment with this useful new feature of MetaTrader 5 you can download the 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.
The first thing this involved was using yet another different computer language. Dukascopy refer to trading systems as "strategies", and if you want to program one you'll need to learn the Java language. Java is based on the C and C++ languages, and therefore does have some similarities with the MQL4 and MQL5 languages used by MetaTrader. JForex and Java provide some advantages over MetaTrader too. Unlike MetaTrader, Java and hence the JForex platform run on other computer operating systems apart from Microsoft Windows. If you create a trading system for JForex it will run just as well (if not better!) on Linux or Apple's Mac OS, not to mention all the other devices on which the Java software platform is now available.
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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:
MetaTrader 5 is not a replacement for the popular MetaTrader 4, but will be offered alongside it.
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