Accessing broker feed bypassing MT4

Hello,

I would like to access the feed data without running MT4.

The brokers server list appears in MT4, and they seem to use port 433.

The servers from the server list don't seem to be responding to ping.

Now how would I be able to read the current tick data, without running MT4? (MT4 DDE server is not an option, since this will have to run on Linux)

Unless you can reverse engineer the metatrader protocol, it can't be done.

Some people have success running Metatrader on Linux using Wine Do a search here for Wine or Linux

There are also a number of brokers that provide APIs that don't use Metatrader that run on Linux. See my list: http://www.forexfactory.com/showpost...5&postcount=32

Thanks 4xCoder,

I am planning to try MT4 through wine with DDE unless I find a simpler way.

Thanks for the API list! I will check them out to see if they are free, or if one can use them without opening a live account at their broker.

Most of the APIs are free and you just need a demo account to test with them.

Just in case anyone wants to know, I have integrated MT4 with my program the following way:

1. a MT4 script running in an infinite loop writes price data to files on disk every second
2. a importer program reads the data from the files every second, deleting the file it has read.

That will not give you a true account of trades. You need an EA doing that and only log what trades actually come in per tick.

Not sure what you mean Kenz987, but I decided for the script because it is not called ny MT4 per tick, and thus I can place it on one chart and it exports the quotes for all the pairs that I need. As an EA/indi it would only be useful for the pair of the chart it is attached to.

You know what you are doing so I'm not making any suggestions here. Just saying that in a slow market you will be logging every second even if there is no action, and in a fast market you will miss trades that may be outside the 1-second range. Good luck with it.

Hello people

There is already an *open source* solution that allows that, it is called open forex platform. Beyond all else, what it does is fully integrate with any MT4 trough an expert (this gives you real time data, you get update for each tick, integration is trough TCP/IP, also all orders operations etc.)

You can check it out at: www.openforexplatform.com

Is this possible? I have got MT4 running under the latest Ubuntu using Wine, and am now looking to see if the Open Office Spreadsheet programme will make DDE links to MT4 running under Wine. I suspect it is not possible, however.

MT4 runs 90% OK, except that I cannot change any indicator parameters in the dialogue boxes on my custom indicators. A workaround is to alter the defaults in MetaEditor and then recompile, which will do for now. Has anyone come across this before, or got any idea of a fix?

This thread is old...
IIRC, Wine does not support DDE.
I ended up writing out a bunch of text files with the live data feed, and reading them with an external program.

Very interesting, kir, thanks for the reply. Can you explain a little further?

I know under Windows, period_optimizer writes a csv file to the History folder that MT4 reads to produce an off line chart of a different time frame, and I guess the process must be similar. Under Ubuntu, I suppose you would need a script to write a csv file real time, that the OpenOffice spreadsheet would link to via DDE. Are there any examples of csv writing scripts available that you can point me towards, so that I can write one for my purposes?

Unfortunately, I haven't backed up my code, so it didn't survive a recent reformat.

The scrippt I had was an indicator, that you placed on one chart, and it wrote the live prices for the pairs I needed to these text files.
You can write files to the files folder in MT4, for some reason I couldn't append to a file, so I had a bunch of files named '1324234325.txt', as it was the timestamp of the feed data in the filename. And theose files each contained one line like:
GBPUSD:1.513454;USDJPY:100.34344;...

You can then read the files continuously with some other software and process the data there.

Hope this helps a bit. I wouldnt have deleted my sources if I knew someone would need them in the future

it is a quite hard job. You need to make reverse engineering, analyzing the packaged passing through it...

I am working on a such project currently.

Let me add more info; What you are looking for is API for MT4, which metaquote will never deliver (from their experience of MT3).

So their are some guy how tried to build solution :

http://forum.mql4.com/5789

http://www.mt4api.net/

and the famous :

http://www.metatrader4.com/forum/12036


But the point is after analyzing their work very well I undestood that none of these guys was actually connecting to MT4 Server !

No, it was either an TCP/IP connection an already running MT4 station (which is very simple to do) or a dll manipulating an preconfigured MT4 .exe file !!!

I think MT4 crypt communication is very strong if no one since years never success to reverse them.

Any way I am still working on it.

Wish you much luck with that project, dinhero! It will be really challanging I bet.

You might also want to get informed on the legal side of this, since cracking proprietary encryption algorithms may be a questionable activity, looking from the side of the law.

You might also take a look at Wireshark or a similar tool for analyzing TCP traffic.

(I've quit trading, but wish you luck with this programming project anyway!)

dinhero,

approaching the problem this way may be a bad idea, since metaquotes can very easily change the client-server format any day they wish (they also have auto update on metatrader) and your work will be instantly invalid.

These APIs are interesting indeed...
To your knowledge, aren't there any similar APIs for controlling the backtester (start, stop, setting parameters, etc.) from external programs?

Is there any bridge or tool execute the trade using Linux shell prompt and get the LIVE tick data feed from MT4 on shell prompt