MB Trading Futures - Introduction

Dear FF Members,

Starting Friday, Oct 16th – Oct 29th I will be unavailable to monitor and respond to FF post.

To fill in while I am gone, Ryan Lovett (MBT_Ryan) from my office has created a Forex Factory membership and will be available on a limited basis to respond to questions and post.

Please remember, if you have a trade issue or need immediate assistance, do not post on the forums. You must contact support via the many options available to you through our contact page.

Thank you for your support.

Well, I have been trying out the demo MBT MT4 and I am thoroughly disappointed with the feed. In two days, when I have tried to close trades at least on three occasions, I have got the message" no connection" even though the tick feed is still working.
Contacted Live Chat, and they said, "Yeh, it happens with the demo but not the live account." What idiot in their right mind would believe that. If they can't get it right with the demo, why have they solved the problem with the live? Surely, the demo is the one that sells the live?!?
I am giving up on their MT4 until they've got their act together a bit more.

LOL. I just saw you posted this twice, once here and once on another thread. I'll just let the other answer sit.

I had the same problems with the demo, but they use the demo to test things which cause problems. I went live on MT4 a few weeks ago and have no issues at all.

Hello all,

I have a strange problem with MBT MT4 platform, I cant use any stop orders nor limit orders.
For example lets say I bought 10 lots EUR/USD @ 1.4900 Market Order..
then when I try to put in a pending order sell stop lets say @ 1.4850 it says "Too Many Orders" ! and the same goes when limit orders for taking profit. What does that mean ? Is this related to the new NFA rules sorry I am not very familiar with it .. Or is it just a MT4 issue ?
Because everything is fine in the Navigator platform with no such problem !!

http://cdn.forexfactory.com/images/misc/progress.gif

I once had an MB Trading account. I have not been trading for around two years. Now I am going to trade again but I forget my account number and password. May I sign up for a new account?

Yeah, I was thoroughly p#ss#d off. Talk about frustrating, especially after migrating from other MT4 platforms which do not have any hassles in the demo.
I wanted to let others know of the dismal quality of the MBT demo in no uncertain way.

Actually, it just depends on your timing. I don't use the Demo much but I have gone a week without an issue, which was more than I needed. What seems to happen is that when they do an update, certain positions and orders get lost or disconnected and you can't adjust, close, or delete them after that. Also, they go down from time to time, and they reset the demo account values on the 15th of each month. So there's tons of little junk that can add up to problems. But like I said on the other thread, it really has zero bearing on the Live environment.

Hey, it's not a problem. You just can't have both sell and buy orders at the same time on the platform because the NFA hedge rule. Use TP and SL for your orders instead of a limit/stop order.

Hey, I cam here to ask MB Trading guys if maybe out of courtesy for their clients they could make use of the emailing capability of the platform and let people know before the DEMO maintenance schedule and estimated duration. Would probably ease off a lot of the gloomy feelings.

yup,i agreed that MBT's MT4 is still not stable for LIVE trading yet

Brewer,
You may be able to utilize your previous account. I would suggest contacting our New Accounts department (866.628.3005), and they can look up to see if your old account is still active with us. If you wish to start with a clean slate you're more than welcome to open a new account: http://www.mbtrading.com/fx/NewAccountType.aspx

TheFisherman,
I will put in a request with our IT department, and see if this is a possibility. These types of notifications (EX: Rollover) are sent out on our live environments, and I would agree having this consistency in the demo environments would ease off some of those feelings. I will keep you posted as to the response I receive.

Thank you for your support,
Ryan Lovett

The Demo is 1000% Unusable!! If you get a few days of operation you're doing GREAT!! - If you wanna test a scalper give it a try but for trades you need to hold for a couple days - FORGET IT!! - The demo is only for raw testing but is down so much its just frustrating!! I have no idea why they cant setup a stable demo for us and a different server to play mad scientist with. I gave up on it a loooong time ago. - I need to see how much my strategy costs me on MBT BEFORE I go Live!! I dont wanna hear about going Live and THEN discovering that I dont like the superhigh commisions, both sided negative swaps and higher margin requirements. A stable demo would let me find out beforehand.

Thank you for responding to my question, its strange this new NFA rule does not take place in the navigator platform !! why only MT4 !!. that is strange isn't it ? You can place seperate TL and ST in the navigator without any problems and the navigator platform will not understand that as a hedge !!.
MBT admin please comment on this issue.

Hope this helps, I had posted this on another thread with the same topic:

Nav and Meta are not the same front end, that's the issue. Meta is a position based system, so if you are long EURUSD, you can create separate EURUSD positions long. However, because of the new hedging rules, of course you can't also try to create a short position. That would be a hedge. You have to manage the trades within the trade with T/P and S/L. Nav is order based instead. You have one net position and you place your trades in the opposite direction to manage that position.

In other words, no matter how long you are in Navigator, any sell orders lower the long position until you are flat and then you go short. You can't be long and short in Nav, thus no hedging occurs.

live is fine here no problems yet......went live in june

Well, it is maybe just a demo, but since MBT version of metatrader is not exactly like a genuine one, i believe it is important to have a reliable demo in order to verify and check that the modification made to the EA is working properly into this new environment, unfortunatly, with all the frozen event, lost of connection, order ticket not longer available for closing, etc... there is no way to check properly. Other broker provide a reliable demo, ( i am not talking here about price being the same as the live, i am talking about been stable) so why MBT simply cannot ?
(Metatrader got stuck from now 3h, impossible to get a login connection )

Do you have a LIVE MT4 account?

Hi salem_747-

As you all probably saw, Justin is out of town (Honeymoon, don’t tell him I told you) for ten days or so at an undisclosed location. I’m here to answer questions that I can while he is away. I’ll do my best.

In response to the Demo situation, let me try to explain it this way.

In the traditional FOREX deal desk world, an execution works like this. You push a button to buy or sell, and your broker either has your account set to manually accept, to requote you by x pips, or to slip you manually. That’s called a deal desk. From a technology perspective, it’s fairly straight-forward because your order just goes between your software and your broker. A Demo in that sort of environment is easy to create because they just set the environment to automatically accept and fill you at the current bid/ask. If you think about it, why wouldn’t they? This way, it looks like you always get filled exactly at the price that you see. Of course, the technological aspect of that execution is fairly simple. Your order came to them and they showed a fill. As we all know, after you’ve been with a broker for so many months, especially if you have had any success trading, then you start to get slipped or requoted or whatever. So in this case, while you have a working Demo environment that gives you fills (which are magically perfect), it only means anything until the broker focuses on your account and starts causing you trouble.

There are some brokers that call themselves ECNs or STP platforms, but in fact they basically place the execution with a single bank and route your order to that bank. That bank is now both sides of your trade. They buy from you and sell to you. From a Demo perspective, those brokers can still do the same thing, which is to just on the auto-execution and make you feel like you will always be filled. In those cases, they claim that they are ECN or STP just because your order is not handled by them, which is obviously misleading. You’ll find brokers that claim to be ECN but still have to put up the margin requirement of a desk based on the NFA/CFTC rules. That pretty much explains how that works. So again, while their Demo environment may give you “fills” to “test” your strategies, they are only real until you get a live account and the firm and their bank start playing the usual games.

Then you can take a system like ours. We don’t execute in house. We don’t have just one bank that gets all of your orders. There is a complex routing mechanism that looks at the various customers, banks, and other players in our quote feed at the time you place your order and uses complex algorithms to determine where to route that trade that should get the highest probability of a fill back. That response, which comes in the form of a quick electronic message from the bank (yes you are filled or no we already executed all we needed at that price in the last split second) is an execution. So let’s be clear about the Live environment versus the Demo environment.

1)We cannot send actual trade requests to “banks” or “imaginary banks” in the Demo environment. The whole messaging structure of sending an order to one of them and getting a fill or reject doesn’t exist if you aren’t sending real orders.
2)This means that any “Demo” environment that we create doesn’t 100% replicate how an execution works. In fact, it can’t remotely replicate the “process.” We know, obviously, that a high percentage of our orders get filled at the current bid or ask, but the method of sending the order out to a bank cannot be replicated. To restate it, there is no way AT ALL to replicate how the live environment works in our system in a Demo environment.
3)This means that if we wanted to create a “Demo” environment that was accurate, we would need to somehow write an entirely different system that gives fills based on the probabilities of what we get. In other words, let’s say 90% of orders fill at the bid/ask and then 6% of market orders fill at the next pip and 3% fill within 2-5 pips, and 1% get slipped further because of news. We would have to create an environment that just arbitrarily follows those stats. That would be the only way to show a “true Demo environment” of what you should expect to get in an execution.
4)The next option would be to do what the desks do, but with an extra step. We could create an imaginary environment where your orders magically filled on the bid or ask every time you placed a trade. It wouldn’t be honest, it would be what the desks do, and it wouldn’t replicate anything in the real world, but you could certainly then run your strategies and assume that your fills would always be perfect.

So what’s the solution. We operate three environments. One is to test very early code builds in house, which is only useful up to a point. One is to test code builds with a lot of trade offsets, the more the merrier, which is the “Demo” environment. One is the Live environment, where only 100% tested code ends up, real executions occur, updates only occur over the weekend, and we maintain these systems at 100% round the clock for obvious reasons.

One other thing. All of the above is a discussion about the Navigator and its demo environment, which is where our executions occur. When you throw MetaTrader on top of the mix, you have an extra step. If you’ve been on our Meta demo, the Meta system might go down for a minute for an update but everything comes right back up and works. However, we might also have a situation where the Nav system itself goes down (for updates or various hardware implementations). When that happens, the orders that are currently in Meta and placed through to Nav for execution essentially get lost.

Now, I can tell you this. Our primary focus, especially after the FIFO and Hedging Rules that hit this year delayed us, was to get a fully-functional live environment out the door because there has been heavy demand for a true ECN system running MetaTrader with as little change as possible. While we can’t beat the hedging rule (although people are just opening two accounts to solve this one themselves), we feel that just about everything else that was feasibly possible is the same in our Meta environment. Separate order IDs. You can close a position in any order because our statements are FIFO. 5-decimals, yes, but that’s an easy fix and the whole market is going there. Etc. We have this open to the public, and obviously we have a lot of demand and the accounts are opening at a fast clip. However, we are technically still in Beta even though we haven’t experienced any issues for a variety of reasons. We should be off-beta soon, and then we will be looking into the following from what I have been told:

1)Mobile app for Meta
2)PAMM/LAMM software for Meta
3)VPS hosting near Trade Servers for EAs
4)MT5 if the market even likes it, which seems uncertain based on what we have heard so far
5)CHANGING THE DEMO ENVIRONMENT so that the updates are few and far between, the accounts don’t reset on the 15th, and orders can’t get dropped due to an upgrade

So, I hope that answers your questions. We aren’t going to create a whole different world just to have a Demo that doesn’t really send execution requests so people think everything gets executed on the bid/ask 100% of the time. It’s deceptive, it’s something that the desks do, and it’s counterproductive. We care most about the Live environment and giving the people that wanted this exactly what they wanted. Now that it is delivered, we’ll start back filling the pieces, no pun intended. If you want to wait for the Demo environment to behave a little better before opening an account, that is up to you, but I’ve got a few thousand traders that didn’t want to already and are happy that we didn’t work on that first and take longer to get them rolling.

Hope that helps, I’ll be around while Justin is away. I work slightly different hours than he does, so if there is a delay in my response, that is why.

Ryan