any comments about MBTRADING (not eFx)

Does anyone here can tell me more about your experience with MBTRADING?

Im having a demo account with 'em after i read some positive reviews in forex bastards, but i would like to hear more in details your experience with 'em...
so far i can see they dont give a crap about your demo account.. i was having a login problem with them and they took three days to send me a email, but i kept having the same problem 'til i opened another demo acct.
Also they have a lame platform, i know they are option broker as well, but they could do better with that..
Most important thing i wanna know from you folks.. is that if anyone of you had security problem and withdrawl problem? today i had market order opened with more than +200 pips running, when i get back home my order was closed at 170 pips and when i called them..they said someone else logged in my account and closed.. so yeah.. its kinda creepy,i never had nothing near to that with my other brokers..
One last thing i would like to discuss.. correct if im wrong somehow.. they s are offering 1-2 pips in spread. Ok thats awesome, but i could see that their commission was almost .5 pip so i must say they spread is almost the same as the other brokers, correct?
Dont get me wrong, they are what ppl are saying, i like them alot..but alll this situations are backing me off a little to open account with them eventually, (we are talking about money, not peanuts).
Have a good one everybody!

I've opened a smaller 5k account with them recently and have been enjoying 2 pip spreads scalping the 1 and 5 minute gbp/jpy alot. I use it to entertain me while my larger trades brew.

As an ECN, the spreads can widen, but the GBP/JPY 2-3 pip normal spread is why I opened an account there. Small 1 minute TL breaks on the GBP/JPY generally jump atleast 15-20 pips.

Vensik do you trade live?
would mind tell us what strategy fits best for gbp/jpy pair? I've been using the Vynner 4 hrs strategy, with some similar pairs and its being great, also since you know better mbtrading than me.. i was wondering if this broker is good for news trading too?

On several occasions in the past I've had a popup saying that someone has logged in as me, however I've never had them change anything. Maybe because I was always online at the time, so when I see this happening, I immediately try to relog in and it might knock them out. A couple times however I couldn't relog in, so I immediately changed my password.

Here is the email I had sent to Justin the first time it happened to me back in April:

He told me that it was strange and to call Travis at MBTF Help Desk to change my password. So I did.

However, when it happened again even after the new password change, I decided to change my password myself via the Account Manager.

I've had it happen approx. 5 times so far, and I have to keep changing my password. It hasn't happened recently, however (knock on wood).

The last couple times, I noticed that it happened after the midnight server maintenance (I can't remember what times it happened on the earlier occasions as I wasn't really paying attention to that at the time). I'm in a timezone where it's still early for me, so I'm still up and trading at the midnight reboot, so maybe that's why I've seen this popup and others haven't.

Anyway, I just figured that MBT monitors our trades and that Justin doesn't know about it (which is the impression I got from his reply saying that it was strange - unfortunately, I can't post his actual reply email since there's a disclosure on the bottom of each email saying it's prohibited).

All-in-all, I really like EFX/MBT because of their being an ECN and I trust them the most out of all the other dealing desk type horror stories I've seen posted about. So, I hope that there isn't anything "out-of-integrity" going on with EFX/MBT, because that would truly be disappointing and disheartening.

SOMEONE Logging into a "SECURE" account is more than CREEPY!!!! And MBT can't tell you whom it is!!!!!

And being told it is ODD and it still happening to others after several password changes is a BIG RED FLAG!

First of all, I have no experience with MBT/EFX.
But if you read the broker reviews on ET you can detect a constant undercurrent of dissatisfaction with certain aspects of their operation.
Interactive Brokers seems to fair much better. If their APIs are indicative of the level of programming skill which has been applied to their overall operation, I would be scared, very scared. The above story only serves to reinforce this impression.

Im with you.. i rather think this is some IT problem than find out they are dishonest, but either way i still dont wanna anyone login in my account!

Yes, that's true.

When it was happening to me, I figured that they might be doing it to make sure that people had "stops" in place, but if you've encountered someone actually messing with your trades, than that's another story.

I haven't had them mess with my trades (at least to my knowledge anyway), thus I figured they were just doing what I mentioned above (monitoring).

You might want to ask MBT to give you more info on that. Ask them directly if it could have come from someone in their company. They should be able to track the IP address of the person who logged in as you. The IP address will not tell you exactly who the person is, but it will at least give you a clue as to where they originated from. If the IP address is from someone working at MBT, then you know it was done by them.

Also, check your computer's log files for Navigator to see what time the unauthorized login occured (you won't be able to get more than that I'm afraid, because the log files don't log the user's IP address). The log file is located in the "Navigator" installation folder in your "Program Files" folder. This is how mine looks:

c:\Program Files\EFX Group\Navigator\Logs

If you signed up directly with MBT and not EFX then when you installed Navigator, it may have created a subfolder called "MBT" (where mine has "EFX Group").

Unfortunately, the Navigator logs don't seem to archive for more than a few days (at least mine doesn't - I only have logs going back from Monday, July 23, 2007. It must reset the logs each week). If you open the log files with prefix "MSG", and do a "find" for "Login dialog", you will see that it has your username but shows "hostID=0". I would think that hostID should show the IP address of the location of the computer who logged in, but for some reason it looks like it's set to zero. I know what my IP address is, so if I were to see some other IP address there, that would tell me that someone else logged into my account. Also, that info could be used to track the perp, and MBT could ban that IP address from accessing the server in the future.

I don't know who wrote this Navigator software, but it's not done with security in mind, because if you look further down that log file, it has our passwords spelled out right there. For security reasons, it should be encrypted, quite honestly. I have hosting for my website (so I know enough about stuff like this) and no place do they store actual passwords on the server. On my web server, everything is encrypted for any kind of passwords stored there. So, for our password to not be encrypted inside our log files for Navigator (and I'm thinking it must not be, as well, on MBT's server), that's a real security flaw, in my opinion.

Also, I really feel that the hostID should show the login IP address, because it's important to know who is accessing our accounts (the IP address should only be our own - you can find out what your IP address is by going to: http://www.ipchicken.com/)

Because my web hosting server puts in place all these security measures, I have peace-of-mind hosting there. There has been incidences of hacking into web accounts, thus all the logging of the info serves to be valuable and to which steps can be taken (like banning the IP address, etc.), so I feel this type security measures should also be implemented for MBT's software/server since security is a necessity.

Anyway, I know it's not an arbitray hacker hacking into our computers (it has to be someone from MBT logging into our accounts), because when the hacks occured my computer had both hardware and software firewalls (basically, I have the works in place for security), and my Navigator is the only thing that was showing a breach, thus why I originally concluded that they were "monitoring", but if you got your trades messed with, that's not good.

I'm going to point Justin from EFX to this thread so he can mention these security issues we have to MBT. Also, it may help EFX with their new Omega project, since these security measures should be addressed/implemented to their new software, as well.

Since you're not signed up under EFX, you might put in a support ticket to have MBT address these issues directly.

Oh and regarding the spreads and commissions ... yes, their spreads are normally small (during normal times when liquidity is high) and I don't find the commissions unreasonable. I've had to pay commissions to reps in the past which run 15% - 20% for my business, so commissions don't bother me.

The key is to do more wins than losses so that your commission percentage is lower than higher . If I can keep my trades to where my commissions come to only 10% - 15% of my profit, than I feel I'm doing good (of course less would be better, but I'm not there yet, lol). If I'm paying too high a percentage to commissions, than I have to rework my trading strategy and money management .

Anyway, I have no qualms with having to pay a commission because EFX/MBT (or any commission based broker) has to make their living/profit somewhere. Also, I'd rather pay a commission to an ECN broker than use a dealing desk who would trade against me and possibly do whatever other unmentionable kinds of shenanigans (according to these forums and their horror stories, anyway).

This is why, I am really hoping that our incident regarding the unauthorized logins isn't a breakdown of honesty/integrity on MBT's part. I will really be sad, because I won't know where to go to find any other broker I can trust .

Yes, I trade live. I just use smaller little TL breaks on the 1 and 5 minute in the direction of the 30 and 1hr trend. Something to do after entering long term trades.

THANKS LEIGHSww for your IT explanation, very detailed lol

I went to my mbtrading folder.. but i couldn't find anything related to ip in the log.
I'll take your suggestion, and contact them on monday.
I know this can be something related to lack of the platform security..im not concerning about hacking or phising yet. This is just strike one.. i wont give up them yet....they still have alot credits with me
But lets believe this is really what youare thinking it is.. they just log in to check out stop losses.. but why do they need to do that?even in demo accounts?
Besides this problem i had... they are good.. just need a little work on the platform (specially in the security area as our geek friend mentioned)
Oh and about the efx thread... i knew they were related but not that much.. would be nice if jleblang could help us here

I have to agree with you here. Even if MBT is monitoring accounts, there is absolutely no reason for them to be logging in to someone's account. It doesn't matter if they mess with trades or not, they shouldn't be going in there in the first place. I hope MBT isn't going to be another broker on the sh%^ list as a result of this privacy breach because they seem to be one of the very few brokers left on this planet that is reliable. I think someone from MBT/EFX should come in here and address this situation immediately.

Yes,

some of my clients also encountered such issue. I gave call to MBTF immediately coz this is very important to find out if my clients login info leaked out? Just to my suprise, the guy who picked up my phone told me that it's MBTF loggged into my client's account, and he seems already know that he will receive call from clients.

Unforunately, I don't get any further info why MBTF log into client's account. But as far as I know, there is no messed up with trades, and the situation is very rare. We have only 2 reports until today.

Hey Guys ~

I’m just getting settled in from the weekend an I see there are a lot of comments and questions for me to respond to, so I will do my best to get to them all today if possible.

Regarding this issue of people getting “logged off by someone else,” it isn’t really happening as described here on the boards. We have verified that essentially people are getting “dropped” or “booted” off of the system randomly due to one of the many internet backbones we use having outages. When the backbone bounces we send disconnect messages, but the wrong message was being sent. To be clear though, it is definitely not a security breach issue and certainly no one has your username/password. On another not just to be clear….MBTF and EFX have monitoring tools that allow us to monitor your accounts with out the need of logging in as the trader and causing such an inconvenience for you.

Thanks for your understanding.

I have posted my reply in the "EFX Group - Introduction" thread. Here's the direct link to my post: http://www.forexfactory.com/showpost...&postcount=954

I've been running demo on EFX since last week. If I leave my station logged on for more than a few hours without any activity, almost without fail I've been knocked off with the same kind of message- "Some one else logged in as you".

On demo this isn't an issue. If I encountered this on a live account, it very much would be an issue.

I think something got lost in translation. Let me try again and be more specific.

When that message is sent, a disconnect is occurring. The only message that the system has to send for a disconnect/reconnect is that message. However, for example, last Wednesday, an internet backbone (315 Main in San Francisco to be specific in that case, there can always be others) experienced a total outage, effecting any clients that were either routed to the north of us or routed through that area (the Internet routing is not always linear). When the backbone bounces the account, the system views it as a simultaneous log out/log in and sends the only message that it knows to send for that. It is just a bounce and not a big deal at all. However, we are going to create a message so that it differentiates between an actual replacement login and a router bounce and gives a different message. In the meantime, what I stated stands. The wrong error message is being sent based on what is occurring because the system doesn’t know any different. The is no security breach represented by that message popping up. No one has your login, and anything that is in your log files on your machine is not available to the public assuming you have proper firewalls and protection.

http://www.forexfactory.com/showpost...&postcount=957

Congrats on finally going live

haha...I love post like this. Why don't you open your $400 account and I'll prove you can. If you call me directly at 877.212.1112 I'll even walk you through the process.