MB Trading Futures - Introduction

Just to chime in here. . .I maintain both a Desktop Pro and MT4 account with MBT for a couple of reasons. First, I have things that only MT4 can do, even though I wish it were not the case. Second, I prefer the order flexibility of Desktop Pro outside of the MT4-required trades.

There are also some advantages to doing it this way that I hadn’t considered until this week. Both the issue last week and the one yesterday were MT4 specific, and I was unaffected in my Desktop Pro account. In fact, I could basically use it to “hedge” against my Meta account that I couldn’t trade in for three hours. I had three positions with take profits in the system in MT4.

Let me also add that I was pretty disappointed in the amount of time it took them to figure out what to do with MT4 this morning. Short outages may be a part of life, but extended times like that are disturbing.

But, after the system came back up, over the course of a few hours, my Pending Limit fill (which hit while the system was down) and one of my Take Profits (which also hit when the system was down) both came through as executed even though the market had moved back against the trades. In other words, another broker might have simply said “trading was unavailable” since the fill on the Pending Limit put me 40 pips in the money. Not here though. I received both fills (and both with the credits for commissions).

I’m not excited about these outages the last week, but I think I take MB at their word that some of it is out of their control. It’s hard not to when they still put the correct prices in my account. As long as I end up where I should have been, especially since I have Desktop Pro working too, it’s clear to me that MB is solving these problems correctly.

You could have saved all of the keytrokes you just made... It was a fucking joke, geez. People.

This looks like a mature trader that is handling his risk rationally.

Yeah ZZ, I'm LOLing at that image too!

well considering the source.....I guess I woulda put a smiley on it....aright I'll cut you some slack on that one.



cheers

I believe a few of you here make a living of complaining about MB Trading rather than doing any real, live trading. I've had a problem or two with them, but I've learned to go to the right people and stay away from complaining about it here. And I must say that they've always been very accommodating in helping to rectify it.

There are lots of choices out there for brokers. If you don't like MB Trading, please move on so the rest of us, including Justin, can use this board in a much more constructive manner.

Steve

So much hate on the forum lately and seems MT4 is at the root of it. I would be curious to see the average account size of MT4 clients and number of complaints from MT4 users vs. Desktop users.

If I worked for MBT I would start asking myself if this whole MT4 thing is worth it or should I just cut the loss and channel my resources elsewhere.

I look at it this way. I sell lemonade in glass containers and after some time I get asked if I would be willing to sell the same lemonade in plastic cups. After many requests, I decide to offer this lemonade in plastic cups knowing that the lemonade may be "contaminated" by low quality plastic (that's the only plastic I can get, no other higher quality plastic exists). But since that's what the clients want, that's what I will give them. After selling my lemonade in plastic cups AND glass bottles I see that the most complaints come from buyers of lemonade in plastic cups. Since I know I sell the very same lemonade in both glass and plastic, something must be wrong with plastic itself and NOT lemonade. Common sense tells me that sooner or later I should stop packaging my product into plastic else I'm risking damaging my brand name by catering to clients who don't know any better and insist on drinking lemonade from plastic cups.
I'm sure I'm generalizing here a lot, but if I was running MBT, this is what would be going through my head.

Have a good day.

I trade at a risk level that is set by my MM strategy(and that I am comfortable with) and takes into account all of the things that can happen(broker problem, internet failure, fast moving market, no liquidity, etc. all things that you lose on)

I don't over-leverage, so I don't need to go apeshit when a trade is a few pips negative regardless of lot size, which is none of your business, but for the sake of transparency I'll say that recently, with MB Trading I have been doing from 1-3 mini lots per trade. Not huge money, but significant. My system would be the same if I had a 1-3 standard lot position.

I was going to say something about my trading success(which I'm very happy with), but it really has nothing to do with this conversation and I don't care what anyone thinks about me or my trading style anyway.

Dammit, you got another one out of me! I've got better shit to do than this.

The Profane Cheerleader

Yeah, if your business model doesn't take into account a flood of "issues" that need to be resolved with this technology you are using, you could be overwhelmed and decide it isn't worth it.

For instance, Microsoft has just discontinued Zune. It was fraught with issues and was not profitable, in fact it was a money pit. They finally had to stop the bleeding. Not saying it is the same situation, but parallels could be drawn.

I also would be curious to see relative position sizing of MT4 accounts vs Desktop(although that might not tell too much) and I would also like to see support "man hour" statistics for both platforms.

I concur wholeheartedly Steve.

Actually, I was not joking about the fact that they may be looking to cut it(I would be), but that they would just let it deteriorate and operate it that way and make users leave on their own.

I say let the those who prefer drinking contaminated lemonade get their fix across the street from another vendor.

It's a neat thought and wouldn't bother me if they ditched it, but given how smooth the Demo environment has finally been for the last 10 days (a record by far), I'm guessing that MT4 is here to stay with MBT. They've probably just decided that it more than pays for itself and that's that. Meanwhile, I still think those that haven't tried Desktop Pro for order control are missing the boat. It may have some charting issues, but it is hands down the best, most reliable platform on the market for execution and order control, and I've tried them all (Oanda, FXCM, IBFX, FXDD, Gain).

Yeah, in reality MT4 is probably one of the the most user friendly apps in forex(I liked it for that reason) and so is perfect for the newbie, because it has all of the bells and whistles, but is still rotten at the core. Anyway, newbies mostly use market orders and that is where MB make their money, and since Oanda was forced to make the same move recently, I'm guessing it it's buttering their bread.

I suppose I should be thankful for this, because if they weren't making so much from market orders, they might not be paying for limits and that would be bad for me! 37 lots in 19 trades today with .95% equity growth and an aggregate commission CREDIT of $.02 Love it.

Agreed, Desktop Pro execution is ridiculous. The MBT Software team seems to be aware of the remaining issues and is working to fix them.

I'm tempted to agree, but then who would pay for our limit orders?!

LOL, it's comical, huh?

The rollover is not, but you do learn how to deal with it.

What happens at "big boy" brokers during rollover?

Now you guys are all starting to bug me. Just kidding, thanks for the comments.

Let me try to put some clarity into this. I’m sure that someone will have something snarky to say in response, but this is the reality.

1) Our execution and routing systems are one component of your account. We take bank quotes and live customer Limit orders (we always have, but now we pay for those Limits) and compile them into a single quote feed. This feed is provided to our partners, our internal platforms, and platforms like MT4. It is the same live feed, there is no difference. Anything you see differently on the charts between platforms is a function of server time, delivery time, and chart rendering. We play no games with our quotes. Our order routing system (call it a Trade Server) analyzes the market at the time your trade arrives and decides in an instant where to send your order. If it is a non-marketable limit, an FX order goes to our ECN. If it is a non-marketable limit, an options or futures order goes to the exchange for that product. If it is a non-marketable limit, a stock order goes to an ECN for display. If it is a marketable order in any asset, it routes to where it is most likely to get the fill at the current displayed price. If it doesn’t get a fill, it snapshots again and sends again. We’ve had an award-winning routing system for years now. Overlooked in the issue yesterday was the fact that we once against tied for top rated broker with three other competitors in Barron’s annual review of on-line brokers. For total score, we came in 0.1 of a point behind one broker.

2) Then you start to add layers to this component. Internally, we have Desktop, Desktop Pro (with charts), Mobile (iPhone, Android, iPad coming shortly), etc. We also offer third party connectivity to our order routing and account management systems through both an SDK/API (for smaller, more personal projects) and through something called FIX (for institutional and commercial level products). A lot of people mention Ninja Trader. They connect to us through FIX. We also have this hybrid situation of MT4. When a broker picks up MT4, MetaQuotes very specifically controls the servers for Live and Demo. They don’t just sell you the product with a license key and let you manage it. They push up updates to their product, including the MT4 Client (what you guys trade from), MT4 Server, and stuff behind the scenes. They have something called the MT4 Manager API, etc. We do not get a voice in what they do. I just want to be very clear about this. If they decided tomorrow to make a change to their MT4 Client, and you download the latest version from their server, and that version isn’t compatible with some piece of what we do, well, that’s how it works. Now, it isn’t likely that anything that they would do on the Client end would not work. But, we always spend a great deal of time watching their server updates. And to be clear, until three weeks ago, they hadn’t done a server update in almost a year. Everyone assumes that they are working mostly on MT5. I think it just got to the point that there were some new regulations that they needed to address, so they did one big server update, and by the way, it used to be that they would update incrementally, so build 221, 222, 223, etc. We sat around 240 for a long time. This last one jumped to 388, so there were probably a lot of little changes and they just never pushed it out. Might also be that some of the changes had to do with building MT5. When they pushed out 388, they issued a statement two days later that there were issues and that 390 needed to be applied immediately. This is the sort of situation that makes us uncomfortable because we aren’t just relying on MT4 to operate as MT4. We cut out and shut off all of the deal desk stuff that was integral to how the product was made and rely on our own component that connects the MT4 servers through the MT4 Manager without the deal desk modules to our execution and order management system. That make sense?

3) Until recently, we have done a lot of testing and tweaking in the Demo environment, where we test new items, which is why Demo runs into issues. We were about ready to be done when they pushed out 388/390. That caused some more issues (you might recall when we flushed all Demo orders three weeks ago, thinking that was the final move to clean it up, and then the update came). So, we had to tweak again, and now, Demo is stable. As my support guys point out, it hasn’t even hiccupped since this update a week ago Sunday, which is different from the hiccups it was experiencing several times per day prior to that. So, to answer the comments about the Demo environment, I think that you’ll find that it stays healthy. I will say that separate from the MT4-specific components of the Demo environment, we also do updates regarding new order types, etc. Even though these don’t work in MT4, they still affect the core Demo environment because everything routes to the same place. So, we may do a trade server update in Demo to test a new order type, and in theory, it might cause Demo issues that affect MT4. So if there is a Demo downtime, it is probably something along those lines.

4) For those of you suggesting that we would be better off without MT4 (or that we are plotting to make it unusable until no one wants to use it…lol…classic), I can honestly tell you that that simply is not the case. We have a very healthy customer base using MT4, just like we have a solid group of customers on Desktop Pro, and many customers connecting to us through the various Third Party applications that write to us (such as Ninja Trader). We have thousands of EAs running on our system. We monitor our server loads very carefully and add live servers along the suggested requirements from MetaQuotes. Our goal is not to corner people into one product. In the case of MT4, since we don’t have any access to alter the code of the Client Software or the servers or how it handles certain things, we basically are limited to providing this in the best state that we could. We do this because there is a healthy group of people using EAs out there, and they have wanted a solution that didn’t involve a manual desk. This was requested four years ago, and it has paid off for us to provide it. We have no consideration of shutting it down. In the last year, the way that I count it, there are about 6240 trading hours in the year. Including yesterday’s 3 hour outage, we’ve been down for a total of about 4 hours, not including rollovers, which is a stated component of our model because we don’t have a manual desk and rely on the banks of the intermarket system for our liquidity. If we also wanted to have a desk, we could bridge that window of usually around 5-10 minutes at the slowest time of the trading day at 5 pm EST to trade against customers and never go down. We. Won’t. Do. It.

5) We offer trading in all asset classes. In the last year, I don’t think there is a single exchange that we are connected to that hasn’t experienced downtime, including NASDAQ, etc. Technology issues happen. It isn’t always just a function of a backup server. We have backup servers. Tech problems aren’t about what you can anticipate and prepare for in advance. They are about the things that you can’t or don’t expect. Put simply, the problems that we have are few and far between, and they generally relate to one of two things…bank liquidity not coming on-line (Sunday start-up and/or daily maintenance) in a timely fashion and MT4 connectivity. Both of those issues include components, and I know wwwin won’t want to hear it, but it is the reality, that are out of our control. Period. Despite all of the complexity, there aren’t many issues. We maintain a trade support desk to help you when something goes wrong.

Our model is simple, although let me go up a notch and discuss it above Forex. We want to provide trading access to multiple key asset classes with low costs and order routing algorithms that help active traders get fast execution from an unbiased source, meaning we aren’t sending your orders to one place that might not be the best price because it benefits us. When it comes to FX, we want to offer an open platform that allows people to connect to us using our own software as well as other software. In the case of MT4, since Metaquotes isn’t in the business directly of plugging into brokers, we had to connect to them ourselves. It’s a hybrid solution that is offered for people that really want to use EAs on a non-deal desk system. There are extra components that we can’t control. That isn’t a cop out, it is a fact. We would love to be able to get in there and tweak MT4, especially the messaging. It pops up Off Quotes for all sorts of things, which isn’t very descriptive of the problem in most cases. We don’t have the ability to do that. However, since your MT4 trades do pass through your account at the order management level, you can see better messaging for these trades by keeping Desktop Pro logged in for your MT4 account at the same time, which is what we recommend you do for a variety of reasons.

We take responsibility for our stuff and despite what someone on this thread is implying today, our IT department does know what it is doing. I would put our “downtime” up against any other broker (forex or otherwise) in the industry. It’s very tiny over the course of the year. And, if we can maybe steer this thread back to a more civilized tone, I’d be happy to answer any questions.

This is why I stay with MB Trading.

P.S. Just kidding about the MT4 exodus plan!

Great explanation, Justin. These are the types of posts that I like to read. They serve as great information for MB's customers. And you're also quite tolerant. I'm sure the whiners will take over very quickly and twist everything that you've said. While I won't look forward to those responses, I will look forward to your continued great explanations in the future.

Steve

+10,000, and done.