DislikedCan anybody point me at documentation on the EFX API, I have browsed though their site but can't find anything.Ignored
The reason you're not finding it is because it's actually the MB Trading API.
- #742
- Jun 4, 2007 3:16pm Jun 4, 2007 3:16pm
- Joined Feb 2006 | Status: Blah blah blah | 1,410 Posts
How could I be so daft! 
Cheers for that!
Cheers for that!
The breaking of a wave cannot explain the whole sea.
- #745
- Jun 5, 2007 5:17pm Jun 5, 2007 5:17pm
- | Joined Apr 2006 | Status: MB Trading | 2,112 Posts
Justin: looking at Metatrader again? I thought you guys develop your own solution and have it ready by years end..
Justin,
MB Trading and/or EFX Group's "Achilles Heel" is their "Foot Dragging" when it comes to providing a free and comprehensive charting program. Please don't mention the alternatives that you now offer....that's is not what we want nor want to pay for. There is a lot that we like about MBTrading and/or EFX Group but we are frustrated with the public relations/cookie cutter answers regarding this issue. Now you are asking us to fill out a survey? I did... but at what stage of development is the company at? Please, tell us in plain english how much longer is it going to take? If my perspective is incorrect please help me understand the situation better. By the way, your webinars are an excellent intro to your trading platform.
MB Trading and/or EFX Group's "Achilles Heel" is their "Foot Dragging" when it comes to providing a free and comprehensive charting program. Please don't mention the alternatives that you now offer....that's is not what we want nor want to pay for. There is a lot that we like about MBTrading and/or EFX Group but we are frustrated with the public relations/cookie cutter answers regarding this issue. Now you are asking us to fill out a survey? I did... but at what stage of development is the company at? Please, tell us in plain english how much longer is it going to take? If my perspective is incorrect please help me understand the situation better. By the way, your webinars are an excellent intro to your trading platform.
Unus pro omnibus, omnes pro uno
- #747
- Jun 6, 2007 1:16am Jun 6, 2007 1:16am
- | Joined Apr 2006 | Status: MB Trading | 2,112 Posts
Justin,
MB Trading and/or EFX Group's "Achilles Heel" is their "Foot Dragging" when it comes to providing a free and comprehensive charting program. Please don't mention the alternatives that you now offer....that's is not what we want nor want to pay for. There is a lot that we like about MBTrading and/or EFX Group but we are frustrated with the public relations/cookie cutter answers regarding this issue. Now you are asking us to fill out a survey? I did... but at what stage of development is the company at? Please, tell us in plain english how much longer is it going to take? If my perspective is incorrect please help me understand the situation better. By the way, your webinars are an excellent intro to your trading platform.
Thanks for the questions and comments.
Let me try to be as straight-forward as possible. Two main points.
First, you seem to be somehow connecting a survey with anything related to the status of our software development. Only a small piece of the survey relates to charting or any of the above. The survey was issued primarily to see the level of understanding in the marketplace about ECN and non-deal desk trading. In fact, depending on how you answer the survey, you can actually go through without many questions about anything except execution. I’m sorry if somehow you thought the survey related in any way to where we are at with software development.
Now I’m going to share a little story. Just over a year ago, we were doing everything we could to figure out ways to integrate our platform with MT4. After in-depth discussions with various people involved, including third-party programmers, we determined that MT4 just couldn’t work (at least not properly) with a non-deal-desk platform. We could hook it up, but you’d have to use deal desk quotes to trigger the executions on our platform (something that another company sort of tried and went under doing), which means that people could get very different executions than what they saw on their charts. To really integrate it is not feasible. If you read around, I think you’ll find that any “next step” in the MT platform is close to 18-24 months away. Software takes time.
Given that, we had many options to consider. We could spend 4-6 months doing some cosmetic changes to make the Navigator fit more with a Forex only trader. We could plug-in a third party charting application (for instance, many platforms like e-Signal, Intellicharts, etc. can offer charting with our quotes at a very cheap rate, but we could have spent the time and money licensing one of them directly). We could take mini-steps and spend money and time “fixing” instead of “creating.” In other words, we could plug-in charting and then people would be happy until they wished that the order entry piece was different still. We could change that and then they’d concentrate on being upset with not having an auto-execution piece.
On top of that, industries change. The needs of the industry evolve. The more you “fix” instead of “create,” the more you run into trouble down the road as your platform is not robust enough to expand where things are needed. In truth, you are dealing with a global marketplace. Ideally, what you’d like is to have a platform that works equally fast around the globe, includes wireless trading from any phone in real-time, includes a wide variety of order types never seen in the industry that only an ECN could offer, includes integrated charts, simple download and install, and then things like automated trading.
The reality is that the best way to accomplish this is to do it all in one and not try to plug one issue at a time. For example, how your charts are written has a huge impact on what you can do in creating an auto-execution piece where people can set parameters and have the system buy and sell for them (EA’s in MT4, for example). So if we just plug in third party charts OR even if we just write a basic charting application to go with the existing product, that doesn’t necessarily mean any of that works with the other pieces. So, if you start from scratch and want to do it right, the side issue is that you aren’t “plugging the holes” where you might have had a simple but not ideal charting solution. In other words, you don’t have a fix in 4-6 months because that isn’t the goal. So, having said that, the decision was made. We have never said anything except that Project Omega will be available in 2007, and recently (about two months ago), I said that a major leap was made in terms of putting the separate pieces together that were being worked on. This doesn’t mean that ultimately it ALL has to be done before we roll it out, but we have to be satisfied that the pieces that we roll out fit with the rest of the modules that are still being worked on.
That’s all that I can say for now. (glad you enjoy the webinars)
Hi Justin and everyone else,
I try not to post much but I still feel my point has not gotten across after our correspondence via email.
EFX is definitely my choice of brokers after doing a few months of research.
Customer service is superb. well done
I will be opening a live account some time soon.
My advice:
The best way to drum up new clients is to give them the confidence that the EFX platforms are reliable and stable.
Your demo acount is appalling I'm afraid. My confidence levels have taken a bit of a hit. Sure I may suck at trading (red is not good right)
but I am not getting the consistency from the platform either.
I don't think the actual problems I have had are worth mentioning since this is not meant to be a negative post.
The live feed apparently does not have any of the demo problems, which I am inclined to believe but theres a bit of blind faith required to make that leap isn't there?
In summary, I am not angry or disgruntled since its just a demo, but I am a little perplexed. Having done a fair bit of marketing myself, I believe EFX should be taking the demo a bit more seriously.
Regards
Paul
I try not to post much but I still feel my point has not gotten across after our correspondence via email.
EFX is definitely my choice of brokers after doing a few months of research.
Customer service is superb. well done
I will be opening a live account some time soon.
My advice:
The best way to drum up new clients is to give them the confidence that the EFX platforms are reliable and stable.
Your demo acount is appalling I'm afraid. My confidence levels have taken a bit of a hit. Sure I may suck at trading (red is not good right)
but I am not getting the consistency from the platform either. I don't think the actual problems I have had are worth mentioning since this is not meant to be a negative post.
The live feed apparently does not have any of the demo problems, which I am inclined to believe but theres a bit of blind faith required to make that leap isn't there?
In summary, I am not angry or disgruntled since its just a demo, but I am a little perplexed. Having done a fair bit of marketing myself, I believe EFX should be taking the demo a bit more seriously.
Regards
Paul
- #758
- Jun 14, 2007 10:33am Jun 14, 2007 10:33am
- | Joined Apr 2006 | Status: MB Trading | 2,112 Posts
Hi Justin and everyone else,
I try not to post much but I still feel my point has not gotten across after our correspondence via email.
EFX is definitely my choice of brokers after doing a few months of research.
Customer service is superb. well done
I will be opening a live account some time soon.
My advice:
The best way to drum up new clients is to give them the confidence that the EFX platforms are reliable and stable.
Your demo acount is appalling I'm afraid. My confidence levels have taken a bit of a hit. Sure I may suck at trading (red is not good right)
I don't think the actual problems I have had are worth mentioning since this is not meant to be a negative post.
The live feed apparently does not have any of the demo problems, which I am inclined to believe but theres a bit of blind faith required to make that leap isn't there?
In summary, I am not angry or disgruntled since its just a demo, but I am a little perplexed. Having done a fair bit of marketing myself, I believe EFX should be taking the demo a bit more seriously.
Regards
Paul
Thanks for the comments. It’s been a while since I’ve posted on this, so I’d like to take the opportunity to cover this topic again because I feel that it is an important one.
There are really a couple of ways to go about software development. I think that many people assume that we should have three environments, and it would work like this:
Staging Environment. This is where new builds of the software are tested in-house.
Demo Environment. This is where customers can interact in a basically 100% stable environment without real money. Nothing should be moved to the Demo environment until it has been thoroughly tested in the Staging Environment and is “bug-free,” to the extent that software ever is.
Live Environment. The real deal, where real money is traded and everything better work as flawlessly as possible.
On the surface, that seems extremely valid, to have these three environments. Now, let me explain the issue with it. The Staging Environment would then be a few people at our company testing new software by trading with basically just each other. See, if we were a deal desk, that might make a lot of sense because it’s just a matter of testing how orders fill against the desk quotes. But in a complicated execution system like ours, even five or ten people sitting around putting in fake orders doesn’t really “test” the interactions that occur. It could take weeks even months to really flush out any issues. In other words, when you are on Demo, your Demo limit orders still reflect as bids and offers to other people on Demo (obviously not to the people in the Live environment because the orders aren’t real money). Those orders from customer to customer can hit each other in the respective environments because that’s what an ECN system like ours does. With me so far?
So, when we do a software code upgrade, and we do them all of the time, what do you think the difference in testing time is between putting it on a Staging Environment with a couple of our people playing with it versus loading it to the Demo Environment and letting thousands of people (literally, we have thousands of open demo accounts) interact? It’s huge. What could take weeks of five people playing back and forth could be seen in hours on the Demo environment. We see the problems immediately because so many people are doing it. And we are constantly tweaking the system for a variety of reasons. In other words, we add banks, pipelines of data, change the algorithms to try to improve executions, add order types, system balancing, you name it. So as we are constantly doing that (assume that we upload about four new software patches a month), would you rather it take weeks each time (which would then slow down the next one and the next one exponentially almost) or a day? And, more to the point, the ultimate goal is to get improvements to the Live Environment. Do you think our Live traders want improvements to take longer or shorter times? Obvious answer, right?
The priority is getting the best stuff to a Live state as quickly and efficiently as possible, and the Demo environment, used as a testing field, is the best way to do that. And then the question comes up (mostly from people outside the company, as if they were offering consulting advice)…”Don’t you think you’ve lost a potential customer here and there who happened to use the Demo on a day that you were testing something and it didn’t work right, so they gave up and never came back?” And the answer is, “Probably, but not nearly to the point that it hurts us compared to being six months behind where we are today if we didn’t do it this way.” That’s our business decision to make, but trust me, stuff like Omega would be more than a year away if we did it that way.
And consider this, which is another factor in why we do it this way. Our platform goes down to the micro-mini, which means you can trade .1 lots, which equals 1000 units (instead of 1 lot = the traditional mini or 10 = the traditional full lot). So on the EURUSD, you can buy .1 and buy 1000 EURUSD using about $13 of your account and risking $0.10 per pip. So you can open up a live account with as little as you want down to our minimum and trade micros and be actually using the live environment with very little risk on a trade and see how it works. That’s supposed to be the beauty of trading forex, especially in the true interbank market system…it’s all scalable right down to the point that you can trade live with an amount so small that it won’t hurt you, but you can really see how the platform works.
I hope this helps - regards
- #759
- Jun 14, 2007 10:40am Jun 14, 2007 10:40am
- Joined Feb 2007 | Status: Balancing | 7,934 Posts
Could it be Man is trying to be something without knowing they're complete?