Is Your FXCM Trading Station Robot About to Break?

A couple of months ago FXCM told us that they were working on educational materials to explain the changes involved in complying with the new NFA "hedging" and FIFO regulations to their customers. Here is one of FXCM's new educational videos explaining to their customers how to manage risk in this brave new world of forex orders without built in stops. To summarise, FXCM are introducing a new type of order called "One Cancels the Other" or OCO for short, which will already be familiar to many futures traders.

Only a couple of days ago FXCM were saying that  "your MT4 EA may stop working after July 31."

Now FXCM are also saying that forex trading systems (better known as "robots" in MetaTrader land) that use the Order2Go API with FXCM's own Trading Station II platform aren't necessarily going to be working as expected by the NFA deadline either. In an email to software developers FXCM state that:

OCO functionality is currently being built into Order2Go. However, while we will attempt to release it as soon as possible, this will depend on our internal testing and the rollout of this functionality to the FXCM Trading Station. This means that the new version may not be released before the regulations take affect. Please note that OCO order functionality is not necessary to comply with the new FIFO regulations, it simply makes it easier. Thus users can still utilize the existing entry order functionality to manage open positions if they wish, until the new OCO functionality is released for Order2Go.

With regards to the general operation of Order2Go after July 31st – If *your account is held with FXCM LLC (see your Combined Account Statement header to confirm) and therefore subject to the new regulations*, you will receive an error when trying to utilize one of the restricted functions (closing specific trades, placing stops/limits etc).

Here at the Trading Gurus we anticipate further such announcements before August 2nd 2009 ultimately dawns.