MB Trading Futures - Introduction

Hello Justin,

I'm trading live with MT4 in MBT since October 2009 with EA. There were no problem (for 3 months) till this week. Now I'm getting quite often Off Quotes message !!! And I can confirm it's not my connection problem. MT4 client is connected and I have 2 accounts in MBT. There where times when one MT4 client had Off Quotes message but the other not. It's happening on both accounts very often and what is most important restarting MT4 client helps. But it's not a solution !!! Also I'm connected to 2 other MT4 brokers - no problem with them.
I think there was something changed on MBT side recently, which is causing this problems. I hope it will be resolved as soon as possible - this are real money !!!

Thank you

EDIT:
Now even restaring doesn't help. One account doesn't have Off Quotes, but the other account with the same currency symbol has.

EDIT2:
I think it has to do something with partial fill. My open positions have TP and this is what I've found in Web Order History:
"1/13/2010 2:55:28 PM1f1e72s:04e3EUR/CHF88000Sold 88000 EUR/CHF @ 1.47767
1/13/2010 2:55:28 PM1f1e72s:04e6EUR/CHF88000Buy 88000 EUR/CHF @1.47734 on MBTX GTC
1/13/2010 2:55:28 PM1f1e72s:04e6EUR/CHF88000GTC Go: Buy 88000 EUR/CHF @1.47734 on MBTX GTC
1/13/2010 2:55:28 PM1f1e72s:04e6EUR/CHF88000Live: Buy 88000 EUR/CHF @1.47734 on MBTX
1/13/2010 2:55:32 PM1f1e72s:04e6EUR/CHF88000Chg to: Buy 88000 EUR/CHF @1.47738 on MBTX GTC
1/13/2010 2:55:32 PM1f1e72s:04e6EUR/CHF88000Live: Buy 88000 EUR/CHF @1.47738 on MBTX
1/13/2010 4:27:47 PM1f1e72s:04e6EUR/CHF1000Bought 1000 EUR/CHF @ 1.47738
1/13/2010 4:58:36 PM1f1e72s:04e6EUR/CHF88000GTC Pause: Buy 88000 EUR/CHF @ on MBTX GTC"
1/13/2010 5:00:00 PM1f1e72s:04e6EUR/CHF88000Buy 88000 EUR/CHF @1.47738 on MBTX GTC
1/13/2010 5:00:00 PM1f1e72s:04e6EUR/CHF88000GTC Pause: Buy 88000 EUR/CHF @ on MBTX GTC
1/13/2010 5:00:00 PM1f1e72s:04e6EUR/CHF1000Bought 1000 EUR/CHF @ 1.47738
1/13/2010 5:15:54 PM1f1e72s:04e6EUR/CHF88000GTC Go: Buy 88000 EUR/CHF @1.47738 on MBTX GTC
1/13/2010 5:15:55 PM1f1e72s:04e6EUR/CHF88000Live: Buy 88000 EUR/CHF @1.47738 on MBTX

Off quote is from about 4:27 PM till now on this one account. Very serious bug. I can't do anything with this order. And what is most important it's happening constantly this week - it's not a problem of one order on one account.

Justin,
Is the demo platform down? Always get "Off quotes" message and cannot place any orders. Please provide an ETA of when demo will be back up. thanks

Chatted with an MBT rep. Unprofessional f*&^$@ , closed the session before i had completed asking all my questions. i was still typing my next question and he just said " Thanks for blah blah... have a nice day... your session has ended" .

started off on the wrong foot , unprofessional behaviour deserves no business. sorry get your act together first.

I have a question. You say you are getting this on two accounts, but I haven't had a problem all week. Is this multiple accounts or just the one trade? I had a stuck trade once and it did exactly what you are describing, but they fixed it when I called in.

These are 2 separate accounts. It's not for only one trade. I'm with MBT since June 2009. Previously I was using MBT Navigator and within 4 months I had to call support to remove 2 stuck trades. But last 3 days it's happening instantly and of course it caused my EA to stop working (after 3 months of no problem). Very strange things are happening, almost always there is 1000 unit (0.1 lot) execution with a price (Bid) that was not show in MT4 - small partial fill. Then the order is stucked for any modification. I can only close it, but I can't place SL or change TP. Even after closing this stuck order, sometimes I can't place new order (Off quotes). It's very critical bug. I think it's simply unacceptable to have any problem with orders. I have account on Warsaw Stock Martek and there the system is perfect (regarding order execution). If something is not working 100% time then this kind of system is not apropriate for financial world.

I like MBT spreads and commisions are now low But if this problem won't be solve I will be forced to resign. Allready I've lost small amount of money because of this bug

I have a question for you. Are you winning lately?

The cftc maybe will change the Net Capital R to 20 m plus 5% of liabilities to FX clients

http://www.cftc.gov/newsroom/general...pr5772-10.html

I would be more concerned with the 10:1 leverage limitation in this proposal

I have another thread about it ...

yes. I hope you will reply soon

Pavikogm,

Have you reported this to the desk or support? I checked our system and I see no reports of this bug you are describing.

I’m not saying it isn’t real, but without some sort of ticket in our system, no one would be looking to fix it. Very important to report issues you have to us.

Bravester,

Sorry you had an issue. Can you tell me who you typed at, what time, and which Chat you used? I can hunt down anyone that actually cut you off and take care of it. We have all of our chats monitored, so I doubt anyone intentionally cut you off while you were asking a question. (Private message or [email protected])


More to the point, what was the question and I’ll answer it here. I see you have another post about Demo. While we have many issues with the Demo environment, to the best of my knowledge it has been up all week starting Monday (not Sunday) with no issues, so I need more details please.

Hi Justin,

Do you have any news concerning the availability of historical data for NinjaCharts?

Thanks.

Ninja is currently testing in private beta NT 7 which includes the MB Trading historical data.

Not sure when it will be pulic.

Justin,

Regarding the new proposed leverage rule that will be decided up in a couple of months, assuming that it is approved, would not the margin then be 10%, instead of the 1% that it is now?

Assuming you are trading EUR/USD, in a situation where 1.5 USD = 1 Euro, would MB Trading still start closing out your position once the equity in your account drops below 50% of the margin?

Because I did the math, and that would mean the maximum you could trade at one time is 4x (NOT 10x) the money in your account ... and you would only have a cushion of 250 pips before a margin call. If MBT waits until the entire equity is depleted before doing anything to the position, then you could survive a drop of 1000 pips instead of 250 pips.

In other words, if the maximum leverage changes from 100:1 to 10:1, then whether MBT starts closing a position when the equity falls to zero or when it falls to 50% of the margin (the current policy) will make a MUCH larger difference than it does now ... a difference of 750 pips no matter how much you trade.

I did the math:

Under 10% margin (10:1 leverage) and trading EUR/USD:

Trade 2x your account = cushion of 3500 pips or 2750 pips
Trade 4x your account = cushion of 1000 pips or 250 pips
Trade 5x your account = cushion of 500 pips or *0 pips

On that last one, you would receive a margin call immediately if you tried to trade 5x your account size, because the equity left in your account would already be lower than 50% of the margin ... 250 pips lower.

I don't think many people are understanding that under 10:1 leverage, you wouldn't be able to trade even close to 10x your account size.


Assuming that MBT does NOT touch your position until the entire remaining equity in your account has been exhausted, then you would still only be able to trade a maximum of 6x your account size, which gives you 167 pips before a margin call. This, of course, pertains to EUR/USD only and the numbers would be different for another currency pair (because I'm multiplying the lot size by 1.5 by the USD to Euro ratio).

U can trade 10 times your account :
For example your account is 1000 $ = 690 euro
U can buy 10 K USD/YEN or 6900 euro/USD which is 10 times your account ...

I think that people are understanding the rule fine. What I don't think you are getting is that anyone that trades their account with that type of leverage gets destroyed eventually.

Actually yes, I forgot to clarify something. When I say 'x' times your account size, I mean the lot size compared to your account equity.

In other words, if you have $1,000 in your account, I call trading 10,000 units of EUR/USD trading 10x your account, regardless of what the exchange is at the time.

The reason for that is because the amount you will gain per pip is not affected by what the monetary value of your trade is, only how many lots it is. What is affected, however, by the exchange rate is how much of your money is locked away as margin.

So yeah, you could theoretically trade 6900 Euros with a $1000 account, but that isn't 10x your account size in terms of units, because 6900 Euros at the current exchange rate is not 10,000 units.

How many units is what determines how much you gain or lose per pip. That is why trading EUR/USD when the price is 1.4000 is no different from when the price is 1.5000 in terms of how much you will gain with the same amount movement. The only difference is how much of your EQUITY is left over due to a higher margin requirement when the price is 1.5000.



Yeah, that's kinda the whole damn point. When the margin is 1%, trading 1-10x your account is no big deal, because only 1% of the trade is locked away. When the leverage gets changed to 10:1, that margin is increased 10x, meaning it is FAR easier to get stopped out of your trade simply by trading, for instance, 6x your account.

You obviously missed my point entirely.

And no, judging by what most people have been posting around here in response to this proposed rule, most people obviously do not understand what a change to 10:1 leverage actually entails.

Hello Everyone,

I wanted to take a few minutes (this won’t be short) and make some broad comments about our MetaTrader and specifically address concerns that some people have had about our Demo environment. I want to get specific about what the issues are and what is being done. I also have an offer that might make this easier for many of you to really get to testing.

First of all, it has always been part of MB Trading’s identity that we listen to our customers and make adjustments based on their needs and concerns when such changes make sense. Obviously, we want our customers to have the best trading experience possible. I do want to say up front that our 100% priority is always our live environment. When it comes to people who have chosen us as their broker in any asset class, we take nothing more seriously than providing them with stability and tools that work for them at all times to protect their funds and give them the opportunity to trade as they see fit. We have always tried to hit a balance between low costs, cutting edge technology, and solid customer support.

When it comes to MetaTrader, this was a particularly daunting project from a technology perspective. I can tell you definitively that there are many brokers that claim to be ECN FX brokers and quite simply are not in a true sense of the word. I can tell you definitively that there are many brokers out there that claim to have “bridged” MetaTrader to ECN execution and quite simply have not. I’m not going to get into naming the brokers, but we know that in order for a trader to truly experience a 100% non-deal desk environment based on the way that MetaTrader works, certain things have to be turned off. If they aren’t, then there is still a deal desk operating behind the scenes, at least at some level. For example, take our maintenance window where we go offline for about 5 minutes at 5 pm EST. The big banks all do this for trade settlement and server maintenance purposes. A broker that does not go down at that time either is left with very little liquidity (ie spreads would go extremely wide) or is providing some liquidity internally (ie an internal deal desk).

So when we set out to give customers MetaTrader that worked with our true ECN technology, we had several parameters that we would not violate. The biggest key, of course, was that we agreed that anything that involved even including deal desk features had to go. Period. That’s our overriding model for FOREX. We want traders to have that “true market” experience with FOREX. This required stripping out a lot of functionality such as Instant Executions (which require a deal desk by definition). That has implications to traders. The way that MetaTrader is designed, you can’t place what amounts to a “market” order and have a stop loss or take profit attached without Instant Execution. This means that people have to place Market orders, then attach a stop loss and/or take profit. We don’t have the ability to change how MetaTrader operates in the sense that we can’t make it so that MetaTrader allows you to attach a T/P or S/L to a market order. If anyone is interested, we can talk about the logic that originally made MetaTrader this way, but the basic point is that we can’t change it. We can only turn off things that we think hurt traders and/or require a desk. I can run through a long list of things that had to be handled differently, but that, also, is not the point of this post.

We have always viewed our Demo environment as a place to get very fast testing for patches and upgrades that we make. This is not just FOREX specific. Our order handling goes across all asset classes that we trade. Remember that MetaTrader is essentially an additional “layer” on our end. We have the entire Navigator system which handles order routing in all asset classes. MetaTrader sits on top of that. In the Live environment, this just means that we make sure that our back end remains up and stable at all times. As I said, this is obviously the priority. We only do code updates to the live environment on the weekends so as not to disrupt live trading. Etc. Obviously, we don’t experience many downtimes for our customers in real world trading in any asset class. We’ve been around for a decade, and that probably wouldn’t be the case if our live environments didn’t run pretty smooth.

MetaTrader sits above that. Your MetaTrader account passes orders through Nav. Now, MetaTrader actually does some buying power checks differently than Nav. So, in reality, both checks are done each time you place an order. MetaTrader handles positions differently than Nav. This is an accounting issue. At the core, everything is about Navigator, which is a FIFO-compliant system that averages positions. MetaTrader keeps positions separate so that each entry can be handled differently, especially for people trading with EAs. These are some significant hurdles, but at the end of the day, this is how it has to work in order to truly be routing your orders to a variety of banks. MetaTrader 4 by itself is not capable of doing this. A broker can’t just pick up MetaTrader and have it send orders to a bunch of banks based on which has the best price. That requires order handling technology plus a lot of bank relationships, and there is a high cost to having those relationships. What we have seen recently is a lot of brokers surface that are a front end for a single bank, so they have no need for order routing technology as all of your trades are routed to that one bank and that bank provides the quotes. They claim to be ECN because the quotes aren’t locked or because the front-end broker isn’t doing the executing. That doesn’t mean you are being offered competing pricing. There is a reason that we win Barron’s Trading Technology award a lot. We have very specific order routing technology that is designed to get you the best price when connected to multiple sources showing pricing, whether that be in stocks or FOREX.

Back to the Demo. There is a balance that has to be placed between how fast we want to move technology forward and how much we want to have a stable demo environment for traders. The reality is that any code update that we do, we can find out how that code update works in a busy environment by putting it into our Demo environment. We do have a separate staging environment, obviously, where basic testing is done. But the customer demo environment where tens of thousands of customer accounts are interacting and transacting gives us the best detail about problems that can arise. Therefore, we do updates to the Demo environments, both Nav and Meta, all the time. If we waited for weekends or spent even more time testing in a less-used environment, everything would take about three times as long to roll out. And what needs to be understood is that we are always adding liquidity providers and updating our routing technology for all markets and improving our reporting and adding order types to Navigator (even if we can’t add them to Meta).

And keep this key factor in mind. YOU CAN’T SIMULATE A FAKE EXECUTION. We can’t send an order to a bank and say “if this were real, would you fill it.” No such thing. So while the Demo environment needs to mirror as closely as possible all of the steps that the Live environment takes, at some level, ANY DEMO ENVIRONMENT has a fake aspect to it. So when we do updates to Nav in Demo, it can throw off something in Meta. If we do a Meta update, it obviously could cause problems.

In fact, we have been working on some major Meta updates. Here’s one example that should be in effect next week at some point. Right now, if you have a position in Meta (let’s say you are long) and you place just a T/P order, that T/P shows as a limit sell order on the ECN. That means that it will get hit as price moves up. You’ll be on the ask at some point, and depending on what other customers do, you’ll either get filled on the ask or by the time the bid moves to that price at the bank level. You can’t get worse than that price. On the other hand, if you have just a S/L on the trade, our system waits until the price drops to your S/L price and then fires a market sell order. But, if you have both a T/P and S/L, the system waits for either price to hit and then fires a market order. This means that in theory, your T/P can hit, but you get a slightly worse price because that bid disappears in the split second that the order is sent. But the reality is that on an ECN, we can’t have two orders sitting out there, and we are NOT the desk, so we can’t create a scenario where “if either side hits, give him a fill and ignore the other side.” However, we are changing the handling of this based on customer requests and working with some active customers. Starting after the update, if you have both a S/L and a T/P, the T/P will show as a limit in our system. This means that your order is reflected and you can’t get a fill worse than that price if the T/P hits. It also means that if the S/L price hits instead, the system must first CANCEL the T/P limit order on the ECN, then fire a market order. So this handling has been changed and it required a lot of testing to make it possible. This has affected a lot of orders in the Demo environment over the last month. We even took the system down completely a few times to make some trade server changes to handle this. Could we have done that only on weekends? Sure, but then you wouldn’t have seen this key update until March or later. That’s just how Demo works.

We do expect, however, that after this update, there will be less development on the MetaTrader side for a while as our discussions with key customers over functionality needs have been mostly met. That means that we can turn to trying to make the Demo more stable for everyone, and I think that you’ll see that happen in the coming weeks. Not next week, but soon. We understand that there are people that really feel like Demo is important. We get it. We feel like Live and responding to our Live customer requests as fast as possible is more important. The two sometimes cause conflicts as Demo by definition suffers when trying to listen to the Live needs.

I can tell you that if we were a less reputable broker, we could easily make Demo more “stable” by simply making the Demo environment operate like a deal desk. This would require very little adjustment on our end. Demo would stay up and everyone would magically get perfect fills. But it wouldn’t be doing all of the things that are actually done in the Live environment, and taking that disingenuous shortcut stands against how we operate as a company.

I do have an offer to help some of you that really want a stable environment to test in. Our system handles any order of any size equally, including micros (1000 size increments). At that size, you can trade a single micro, get a real execution every time, and gain/loss $0.10 per pip. You can open an account and fund with our $400 minimum and I think you’ll find that everything works just fine. Therefore, if you send a note to cashiering when you fund that you will initially be using the account as a “real-world demo,” they will credit your account $10. That should easily offset the cost of doing some testing with micros. You’ll have a very reliable system that actually does all of the steps all the way up to and including an execution. This is not something that we will offer forever, but until you hear different from me here, it is an option for some of you. We have so many people that are having a great experience trading with us live that I hate to hear that some of you are struggling with Demo, so I requested that we make this offer.

I disagree with u but i dont want to argue , if u trade cable it moves more than usd/cad and usd/yen in general , 1% of 1.6 is 160 pip but 1% of USD/Cad is 100 pip , anyway if u buy 10000 NOK/SEK with a 1000$ account this is not considered 10 times your account .