MB Trading Futures - Introduction | Page 30 | Forex Factory

Options

Go to
Permalinks
Print Thread

Similar Threads

Introduction and trading basics 27 replies

Introduction to Level 2 4 replies

VTTrader: How to Write Your Own VT Indicator Introduction. 0 replies

Interest Rates: An Introduction 0 replies

An introduction to spread betting 0 replies

Attachments: MB Trading Futures - Introduction
Exit Attachments

MB Trading Futures - Introduction

  • #581
  • Apr 5, 2007 1:58pm Apr 5, 2007 1:58pm
I responded to your request here to send you an email. The email was sent. I am not your competition like you hoped. I gave very specifics times and dates. I will personally email exact times of wide over 6 pip spreads to you when they happen so you can verify from logs. Right now spreads are in a 2 to 5 range for gbpjpy and have been for awhile. I can and will prove everything above is true and this point I don't care to expand this any further. I think I made my point and hope this will broaden the scope of what is really happening to a trader that is actually trading 2 live accounts 18- 20 hrs per day with you.
  • #582
  • Edited 2:23pm Apr 5, 2007 2:10pm | Edited 2:23pm
Big deal.... watch the asia session for once and see what happens there during the night. At 15:05:34 spread was 5 at 15:07:18 spread is 4, it does vary and sometimes it is 0,1, and 2 and there is also long periods of time it is 6.7.8.9. I have the knowledge to enter trades with limits, but that doesn't help you when you are in the trade and it goes wide and prevents you from taking profits you should have gotten. I am finished and have said my findings and will let this rest my point has been made.
  • #583
  • Apr 5, 2007 2:28pm Apr 5, 2007 2:28pm
Quoting forex_newbie
I connected to the platform via dial-up while the issue was being sorted. (I now know its wise to have good old dial-up for security).
Can you dail in to EFX directly with a dail-up modem?
  • #584
  • Apr 5, 2007 2:30pm Apr 5, 2007 2:30pm
Quoting shrike
Can you dail in to EFX directly with a dail-up modem?
No I meant connecting to the internet via a telephone ISP dialup connection as opposed to cable/broadband.
  • #585
  • Apr 5, 2007 2:35pm Apr 5, 2007 2:35pm
Quoting Forex1man
Big deal.... watch the asia session for once and see what happens there during the night. At 15:05:34 spread was 5 at 15:07:18 spread is 4, it does vary and sometimes it is 0,1, and 2 and there is also long periods of time it is 6.7.8.9. I have the knowledge to enter trades with limits, but that doesn't help you when you are in the trade and it goes wide and prevents you from taking profits you should have gotten. I am finished and have said my findings and will let this rest my point has been made.
GBY/JPY is the wildest craziest and most volatile pair there is - you've just successfully described its behaviour and not a flaw with EFX. Traders who have learnt to tame this beast simply love it because of its volatility and daily range.

I suggest you trade with mini or micro lots.
  • #586
  • Apr 5, 2007 3:23pm Apr 5, 2007 3:23pm
That is why I trade it. I said I would shut up ,but............. here is the perfect example of howit is not gbpjpy but getting screwed through your broker. I just made a trade few minutes ago price was 233.97-233.99 nice 2 pip spread right........ okay I sold filled 233.97 bid dropped to 233.92 going in right direction right........ wrong ask moves up 234.00 ... to get out of your trade you must buy at the ask price. Instead of dropping the ask with the bid, they play the game and raise the ask, that is not gbpjpy doing this this is your great broker MBtrading alogrithim they use for controlining bids and asks. Now I am finished, hopefully some people have the brains to realize how the game is played to control your trades and still say, our spread is only 2 on gbpjpy, excuse the language but that is a lot of B.S.
  • #587
  • Apr 6, 2007 2:47am Apr 6, 2007 2:47am
Quoting Forex1man
That is why I trade it. I said I would shut up ,but............. here is the perfect example of howit is not gbpjpy but getting screwed through your broker. I just made a trade few minutes ago price was 233.97-233.99 nice 2 pip spread right........ okay I sold filled 233.97 bid dropped to 233.92 going in right direction right........ wrong ask moves up 234.00 ... to get out of your trade you must buy at the ask price. Instead of dropping the ask with the bid, they play the game and raise the ask, that is not gbpjpy doing this this is your great broker MBtrading alogrithim they use for controlining bids and asks. Now I am finished, hopefully some people have the brains to realize how the game is played to control your trades and still say, our spread is only 2 on gbpjpy, excuse the language but that is a lot of B.S.
assuming that you are right ,they do this game only gbp/jpy ,because for the rest of pairs i never saw something strange.......so' ? i believe the problem is Asia session ,anyway other brokers have spread 10 pips !!!or more.....
  • #588
  • Apr 6, 2007 4:54am Apr 6, 2007 4:54am
Quoting bAASHARM
Nice to hear so many good things about EFX. I've opened a live account with them recently, but I'm not going to fund it and here's why:
I'm mainly interested in the free API in combination with thight spreads, fast execution and odd lotsizes for some autotrade ideas I have.

I opened the account to start working on the API, they have a yahoo group to support the API. Once signed up I got access to a few ZIP files with some examples and a "help" file. Now it turns out that the API has serious problems with .NET software developments tools and they reccomend to use Visual Basic v6.0, which was introduced in 1998 (!) and is not really supported by Microsoft anymore. Basically, the rest of the world changed over to .NET years ago already.
When I mentioned that on the support forum, my message was deleted. It seems they don't allow any MB/EFX negative posts there. That in combination with the scarce information and limited support ("download the example files, have a look at it and you can figure it out by yourself") made me decide to go with an other ECN.
I have a funded live account with EFX.
I too am very disappointed with EFX's API development (though i got nothing else to complain about EFX other than PAMM+swap rates+no interest free),

Even more disappointed is the fact that whenever questions about API is asked here, answers will be the standard " go to our SDK API website".
I believe good customer service must be a complete one without having a potential client be "re-directed" around.
I would suggest to have a EFXprogrammer representative be involve in this Forum thread beside our helpful JieLang. In that case, it will definitely help. Because in my opinion, the Yahoo SDKAPI group is downright confusing. Even EFX/MB's one-to-one chat could not answer API's question.

Finally, if anyone could answer directly without re-directing to the useless SDKAPI Yahoogroup....here is my question>
When will EFX's API be UPGRADED from the 1998 outdated Visual Basic v6.0 and serious problems with .NET software developments tools fixed?

thanks for listening.
  • #589
  • Apr 6, 2007 8:28am Apr 6, 2007 8:28am
Guys, i too expermimented with the API, and i found the yahoo-group quite helpful. MBT-api support will NOT teach you vb.net, they just answer questions about their COM-objects, which i found to work flawlessly in any .net language. Phil answers really fast, usually within an hour on that list. Infact, i thought their API and their API-support was really a plus of this brokerage. If you look in the files section, there is a C#.net example project you can have a look at.

What problems did you have? Maybe i can post some code-snippets to get you started.
  • #590
  • Apr 6, 2007 9:35am Apr 6, 2007 9:35am
Quoting shrike
Guys, i too expermimented with the API, and i found the yahoo-group quite helpful. MBT-api support will NOT teach you vb.net, they just answer questions about their COM-objects, which i found to work flawlessly in any .net language. Phil answers really fast, usually within an hour on that list. Infact, i thought their API and their API-support was really a plus of this brokerage. If you look in the files section, there is a C#.net example project you can have a look at.

What problems did you have? Maybe i can post some code-snippets to get you started.
that would be really great. I want to automate my trading with EFX but dont know where to start. Maybe you could start a new topic about this?

thanks much.
  • #591
  • Apr 6, 2007 9:55am Apr 6, 2007 9:55am
I can tidy up my lil vb.net project, it demonstrates how to login, trace connection, recieve and displays quotes, usage of the ocx-controls, and order-placement.

One thing to mention is that they dont provide any data-history. You have to collect your own, or use a datavendor like tenfore or esignal to get the history. Both options are not trivial to implement in your project and involve quite advanced coding knowledge, and i didnt go that far. All they provide is realtime-quotes. So even a simple MA-crossover system(or any system that relies on indicators that need data-history) will be a big odysee to program. Depending on what you are trying to archieve, this would be a problem.

If you are still interesed, i will comment and tidy up my experimental code and post it here.
  • #592
  • Apr 6, 2007 10:51am Apr 6, 2007 10:51am
plz. thanks so much :
  • #593
  • Apr 6, 2007 11:59am Apr 6, 2007 11:59am
Quoting Forex1man
That is why I trade it. I said I would shut up ,but............. here is the perfect example of howit is not gbpjpy but getting screwed through your broker. I just made a trade few minutes ago price was 233.97-233.99 nice 2 pip spread right........ okay I sold filled 233.97 bid dropped to 233.92 going in right direction right........ wrong ask moves up 234.00 ... to get out of your trade you must buy at the ask price. Instead of dropping the ask with the bid, they play the game and raise the ask, that is not gbpjpy doing this this is your great broker MBtrading alogrithim they use for controlining bids and asks. Now I am finished, hopefully some people have the brains to realize how the game is played to control your trades and still say, our spread is only 2 on gbpjpy, excuse the language but that is a lot of B.S.

Update - This person did contact me directly at [color=red][email protected][/color], though they have still not identified themselves and I have sent this response to them directly, but I thought everyone else might find it educational.


Again, we don't "shut down" our servers. At midnight EST, we turn off the "order entry" server for five minutes for a reset, but you can still be filled on orders that already in the system based on the fact that the order routing server is still operating.

There is no point in time that we would shut down all of our servers during trading for one minute. Now, let me explain to you a key difference between a deal desk and an ECN that I don't think you understand.

When you operate via a deal desk, there is only one flow of data because they are the only ones that provide you with a quote. That is very easy to maintain from all aspects (servers, bandwidth, etc.). Whether they will actually execute you at those prices is a separate conversation.

Now, on our platform, you have multiple banks, some through direct access to each bank individually and some through pipelines of liquidity, that you are viewing and executing against. This is far more complicated. What happens is, all of their servers must stay connected to our central hub server, and then our server must process their quotes and structure them so that you can see them correctly. On something like a news announcement around the world, all of these separate pipelines and banks experience "surges" as the banks shift their orders, pull their orders, replace their orders, and customers try to hit, plus banks interact in a bank versus bank system. That causes all of the servers involved, most of which are not ours directly, to get jammed up as they try to pass an extraordinary amount of information in milliseconds. Our servers are then hit with all of that trying to make sense of it, and if the news announcement is big enough and enough happens, you can get a data bottleneck. This is very similar to what happens on the NASDAQ or NYSE with stocks on heavy volume days when the exchanges report that their quotes are delayed. Happened last week once in stocks, for example.

Now, what does that mean on your end? It could very easily mean that our servers get bogged down trying to sort out all of the information from all of the sources, and that could easily disrupt the quote server itself, which is what you see. And that says nothing about the routers between your office and ours. However, keep in mind that any orders that you already have in the system are on our routing server, so they would not be prevented from executing just because you think the quotes froze for a moment or something like that. Now, if you tried to enter a new market order, obviously, who knows what could happen when you can't even tell what the quote is, which is why we discourage news trading in general, and CERTAINLY no market orders on news, as you already stated.

So no, we did not turn off our server this morning. That is 100% true and would never happen. Because we don't take the other side of a single trade of our clients, there is no purpose in doing that. Deal desks do that so that they don't have to execute clients. We only get paid when you are executed, so we have no reason not to leave you connected and hope that the servers can handle the amount of data and get you filled under your parameters. So again, 100%, we did not and would not ever "turn off" our servers for news. There would be no point. Is it possible for data on the quote server to bottleneck because of the complexity of the amount of data coming through on news? Sure. Does that prevent your orders from triggering that are already in the system? Not one bit.

As for the order problem that you had, let me start with this. Charts in FOREX show the bid by default. If you had a buy stop order in the system on news, you could very easily have been filled 20 pips higher than what the chart shows because the chart would show the bid, not the offer or last trade. Now, if you will give me your account number, since you don't seem to exist in our system, I will personally try to track down "Ken" and find out if a report was ordered. Give me the date of the trade and the account number. This seems very basic if you are saying that you are our client and want us to try to help you. Otherwise, while you do seem to have a specific example, what you are saying is still in question. I will personally look into this matter and find out the reason for the problem. If there isn't a good explanation, I will likely be able to fix the trade. There has to be a reason, and we have to be able to show it to you.

Finally, in regard to the GBP/JPY, you seem to make some faulty assumptions about how this works. We have thousands of customers trading the GBP/JPY at any one time. We don't just adjust the quote to widen in because of you once you are in. There are plenty of other customers interacting with the market after you are in. That just makes no sense. We don't adjust pricing at all. We have multiple feeds, and whatever the banks are showing is the pricing that we can offer you. That's it. If you feel that our "spreads" are too wide, and you can't use the orders like our limit orders to get better fills between the spreads, then you probably should look elsewhere. We don't get a lot of complaints from people about our GBP/JPY spreads and liquidity. Make fixed spread platforms still charge 8-10 pips each way, and we spend a lot of time during the core session at 2-4 pips, plus allow you to fill in between. Of course it can go as wide as wherever the best bank orders are to buy or sell, but that's not in our control. The ranges of the forex pairs over the last two weeks in particular have been very light, less than 70 pips some nights on something like the GBP/USD, which is usually much wider. This is because a lot of the world has been on Spring Break, and less people, including the banks are trading. We also see this happen in August, which is a common vacation time in Europe. Less people trading and less activity means wider spreads in the real market. So this isn't about you or anything like that. If you want to interact with the real marketplace, the spreads are what the spreads are. If you want to interact with an artificial marketplace, then you probably want to find a deal desk...until they start manipulating against you, slipping you, giving you requotes or no fills. This just isn't something that we do.

Regards,
  • #594
  • Apr 6, 2007 12:18pm Apr 6, 2007 12:18pm
Quoting shrike
Guys, i too expermimented with the API, and i found the yahoo-group quite helpful. MBT-api support will NOT teach you vb.net, they just answer questions about their COM-objects, which i found to work flawlessly in any .net language. Phil answers really fast, usually within an hour on that list. Infact, i thought their API and their API-support was really a plus of this brokerage. If you look in the files section, there is a C#.net example project you can have a look at.

What problems did you have? Maybe i can post some code-snippets to get you started.
Hi shrike,
Thanks so much for your reply.
I guess its the way infomation is layout in yahoogroup that makes navigation+usability so confusing. Thanks for the other perspective of things.
So you mean we can just use vb.net? ...even for moderately complex programming?
Need your help to recommend a few programmers for me... any?
Cos i would need to test out my latest system on EFX.
Thanks in advance for everything.
Rgds,
Ed
  • #595
  • Apr 6, 2007 12:37pm Apr 6, 2007 12:37pm
edchong: you can use any COM-compliant language, be it vb6, any .NET language, delphi, whatever.

Here is a small vb.net project i worte, just to test things out. I used the free Visual Basic 2005 Express Edition to write it. Its not the most elegant code, since i am not a professional coder myself, but it works. It shows how to recieve quotes, place orders, handle events and use the navigator OCX-controls.

I hope you can make some sense of it, i put some comments in it to hopefully make it more understandable. Once you get some basic vb.net skills and get the hang of it how the mbt-objects and events work, its quite easy to program with the api.
Attached File(s)
File Type: zip EFXpad.zip   309 KB | 470 downloads
  • #596
  • Apr 7, 2007 2:22pm Apr 7, 2007 2:22pm
Wow Justin, what a reply to Forex1man.
In an industry full of ripoff artists your sincerity and professionalism is shocking.
If I can keep my head above water in forex investing I feel compelled to open an account with you just out of respect for the way you do business...'coarse your apparent small spreads and execution are a big plus too!
Bill Marsh
Los Angeles
  • #597
  • Apr 7, 2007 9:25pm Apr 7, 2007 9:25pm
I think just the fact that someone representing EFX will answer all of these questions good or bad in this forum in itself says a lot. I haven't seen any deal desk broker do it!

I've traded live with a group that uses an MT4 deal desk broker while I've used EFX and I consistently made more pips than the other members during news trades and scalping due to tighter spreads and less slippage. Also, THERE ARE NO REQUOTES! I missed out on many would be good trades with the deal desk broker due to requotes and bad fills. The deal desk broker wouldn't even let me modify my trade if I was within 5 pips of my stop, which would never happen with EFX.

Justin gives a webinar which makes learning the platform a snap and he'll answer any questions at the same time. My experience with customer service was good also.

Now their the first to admit that they are not the best for carry trades, but you have to use the broker that best fits your style of trading. I think for news trading and scalping or short term trading if you give EFX a try you will definitely see a huge difference vs. a dealing desk broker as far as good fills, less slippage, tighter spreads, no requotes and no stop hunting. Also, I run my MT4 platform(for running EA's) and EFX at the same time and the MT4 regularly freezes up during news and goes offline 3 or 4 times a day for no reason while the EFX platform rarely goes offline at all and has never frozen or slowed down at news times.
  • #598
  • Apr 9, 2007 10:54am Apr 9, 2007 10:54am
Dear Forum Members,

Please join us April 11th for an advanced webinar on the EFX Navigator.

This webinar will be for advanced training using the many different features of the EFX Navigator. We will be covering the following;

1. Order Types - All 15 of our flexible and efficient orders covered in depth.

2. Level ll - Placing trades between the spread.

3. Q &A - Plenty of time to take your questions.

Start Time: 8:00pm EST - 9:30pm EST

To register please follow this link; https://www.gotomeeting.com/register/372409188

If you have any questions prior, please do not hesitate to ask.

I'll see you all there.

Regards,
  • #599
  • Edited 8:46pm Apr 11, 2007 8:19pm | Edited 8:46pm
Maybe I keep missing it... but I cannot find my answer. EFX offers 100:1 leverage, what is the Margin Maintenance Requirement? Simply 1%? Or I read 25% intraday and 50% overnight (0.25% and 0.50%?), or was that only applicable to stocks?

Thanks for the help,
Rob

NVM, got my answer from MBTrading site... 1% it is. I only ask because the account with Oanda is 50:1 but has a MMR of 1% instead of 2%.
  • #600
  • Apr 11, 2007 11:05pm Apr 11, 2007 11:05pm
Great webinar!
Thank you Justin.
"Every battle is won before it is ever fought." - Sun-tzu, The Art of War.
9 traders viewing now