Using metatrader with any broker of choice

<hr style="color: rgb(209, 209, 225);" size="1"> <!-- / icon and title --> <!-- message --> im not totally familiar with all of this, but i was thinking...

i know there are a number of us who want to use metatrader (a great platform) as a charting tool for our brokers (who have crappy platforms) data feed.

for example, there is a way to access Interactive Brokers data feed, but no way known to pump it into metatrader. im sure it is possible, but we dont know the format of the metatrader data.

so this is my question for the more advanced computer guys out there

how would we go about writing a snooping application to look at the protocol between metatrader and its server? if we find this out, then its easy to wriet a simple server app to read in data from your own broker and spit it out in metatrder format

wouldn't it be encrypted? I guess that would make things a bit harder. But I have no experience...

of course you don't need to write anything to see what's travelling across the network, there are plenty of programs out there to do packet sniffing.

hmm i guess it could be encrypted. i never thought of that.

what are some sniffing programs/

yeah you are right, probably is encrypted. look at the .hst files

http://www.snapfiles.com/downloadfin...packet+sniffer

Hello,

My name is Wayne from Boston Technologies, we are the MetaQuotes distributor in the US, and also offer after market modifications such as client terminal add-ons and STP for brokers with MT4. What I can tell you is the connection between the Client Terminal and the Server specifically is one of the most protected connection of the entire complex, the client terminals are free, you can take them and your EA's between brokers, why not just find one that uses MT4?

If you want to pump signals into the terminal from the clients side (via email etc), or add a service to the server from the brokers side we can help; otherwise its not worth spending so much time to crack the communication protocols to connect a quote feed because MetaQuotes regularly updates the terminals and your 'solution' may work for a day or two then everything changes and you have to start over. An alternative is to forward us your brokers info and we can help them get the platform for you if they are interested, but we generally don't cold call on behalf of an anonymous or prospective clients, or without contact info from both parties.

Packet sniffing:

http://www.wireshark.org/


Decryption (maybe)

Run MT4 through the Grinder TCP proxy


http://grinder.sourceforge.net/download.html

"Should you encounter further problems with your SSL connection you can turn on debug by using the following switch:
-Djavax.net.debug=sslNote
This will generate verbose output."

Sounds like decoding to me...

MetaTrader uses port 443 for communication with a server but it is not SSL protocol. SSL is easy to decode if you have full access to a client (of course the client will be aware that a connection is no longer secure). As it was mentioned earlier MetaTraders has its proprietary encrypted protocol.

Yes, Grinder will certainly remove the SSL encryption layer, once it's done you have to reverse engineer the protocol though.

I do have grinder installed, ill give it a try on these days, but its not the kind of project you can pull off alone in a weekend, and the benefits dont seem to be too interesting do they?

hst files are not encrypted they're just in binary form. as a matter of fact there are scripts that will convert them to CSV, you can understand their format by looking at the source