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  • #7,141
  • Apr 6, 2011 9:29am Apr 6, 2011 9:29am
Quoting blueJ
Again today I had an order take 9 seconds to execute. The price wasn't moving far, just fast. This is a real issue. 1 person could mess up the whole MBT system with hotkeys and just bid/cancel, bid/cancel, lightening fast and MBT won't be able to route any orders.
blueJ,

Can you fill me in a little more on what you mean by that? How does one person’s hotkeys “mess up the whole MBT system”?
  • #7,142
  • Apr 6, 2011 9:29am Apr 6, 2011 9:29am
Quoting PoundTrader
most of these problems started when they started paying for limit orders, seems like they now only have 1 or 2 LP in there system.
We have exactly the same number of banks available in our system today as we did prior to launching PFL.
  • #7,143
  • Apr 6, 2011 9:30am Apr 6, 2011 9:30am
Quoting fxking
Really? in that case i think MBT should scrap their "pay for limits orders" scheme and spend to improve the connectivity,filling for opening/closing orders,etc instead. it seem like MBT's platform is really getting more 'unstable' nowadays? how,justin? u guys at MBT doing anything abt it?
Please send me in private your account number and example trades (either with order ID or Deal # depending on whether you are using Desktop or MetaTrader) that you feel have been problem fills. Also, please let me know where your software resides and is running (state, country, etc.). I will take these examples and investigate and report back to the forum.
  • #7,144
  • Apr 6, 2011 9:30am Apr 6, 2011 9:30am
Quoting torroray
Are they moving towards the bucketshop direction?
Torroray,

Of course not.
  • #7,145
  • Apr 6, 2011 9:31am Apr 6, 2011 9:31am
Quoting signorx
In march I have made 622 trades on EUR/USD and I haven't had any type of issue with connection or filling. In my opinion MBT is one of the best broker available, and pay for limits is great for people like me that use a lot of limit orders.
Signorx,

Glad to hear it and thank you.
  • #7,146
  • Edited 10:31am Apr 6, 2011 9:32am | Edited 10:31am
Quoting torroray
Have it ever crossed your mind that there might not be any LP at all and we all trade amongst our-self and MBT have some algo running to hedge its risk with Tier 1 Banks. And those Level II figures are just display just to satisfy the NDD STP category.
Torroray,

Mathematically and legally, that would not be close to possible. The majority of trades on our system still execute against banks, and the NFA would never allow us to display false information (such as in a Level 2). The NFA audits us annually and would never allow something like that to pass.
  • #7,147
  • Apr 6, 2011 9:33am Apr 6, 2011 9:33am
Quoting fxchant
Zero chance that any broker's customers put up anywhere near enough liquidity to satisfy the other side.

Zero chance that the NFA would allow them to state that they have banks in their system when they did not, given the regulatory process.

Zero chance that MBT is moving in the "bucketshop" direction. If anything, they are moving further away from the rest of the industry.

I ran my logs for March. 450 orders executed. Less than 15 took more than two seconds. Hate to say it to you newbies, but the market moves around. It doesn't always...
Fxchant,

All true and thanks.

  • #7,148
  • Apr 6, 2011 12:44pm Apr 6, 2011 12:44pm
Quoting jleblang
We have exactly the same number of banks available in our system today as we did prior to launching PFL.
can you tell me how many banks? im not asking for the names just the number of banks you have in your system
  • #7,149
  • Apr 6, 2011 1:18pm Apr 6, 2011 1:18pm
Quoting shrike
Obviously there is a reliability problem in their order execution logic, under specific circumstances. Just because you have been lucky, doesnt mean it isnt there. There have been numerous independet reports about this now. Can't you see what a stop-loss order executing a minute late could potentially do to your account?
Following this thread and comparing the reviews, both pro and con, to my own experience with MBT, I just can't help but feel that a lot of the problems have more to do with customer incompetance than legitimate broker side issues.

Considering the amount of fake complaints, errors that aren't really errors (daily rollover, for example-- we all know it's coming, no excuse if you get hit), etc. it's difficult not to take a lot of these posts with a grain of salt. When someone posts some 'problem' that cost them, Justin comes in and says there were no problems during that timeframe but you should give him your info so he can look into it for you and report back, and then said poster never responds-- it makes me highly suspicious that the problem originated with the client, not the broker.

My biggest problem is server downtime, which I've encountered a few times in the past few weeks/months, and I have seen a number of posts about it-- it sucks and I hope MBT is working to minimize it. Myself working with a financial operations company, I know this stuff happens and it's good to have access to the desk, which I've only fortunately had to call once. But to put things into perspective for some, major exchanges have problems all the time. The LSE has recently migrated some of their markets to the Millenium exchange, and we've had a number of days where the LSE released official closing prices before the market closed, or published previous day prices instead of current day prices. NASDAQ has connectivity issues every week where you won't be able to trade in a certain symbol range for minutes at a time. The Chicago Stock Exchange (CSX) routinely (I mean literally every day) puts out trades that are 100%+ off the market until they're eventually cancelled.

This stuff happens, and until you realize that no brokerage or data supplier is perfect, you'll never be happy with any broker.
  • #7,150
  • Apr 6, 2011 1:33pm Apr 6, 2011 1:33pm
Smittens, I've been trying to point out problems at other much larger venues before. I'm glad at least someone is on the same page.

Have a good day.
  • #7,151
  • Apr 6, 2011 2:11pm Apr 6, 2011 2:11pm
Quoting smittens4212
Following this thread and comparing the reviews, both pro and con, to my own experience with MBT, I just can't help but feel that a lot of the problems have more to do with customer incompetance than legitimate broker side issues.
Doubt this is the case here(while there are undoubtly alot of user error cases). The first time this was posted here (and this specific incidence took even longer than a minute IIRC), JLB explained indepth what and why it happend. So its confirmed & apparently intended behaviour.

Of course there are issues, even with exchanges, all of the time (even EBS had an outage last year). The problem here is that there are no steps taken to remedy this, or at least it wasn't communicated. Secondly, while this behaviour is by design, this is completly undocumented, since there is no published order execution policy. For example, i would like to know, are IOC orders immune to 1+ minute fill time? Can this be avoided by sending deep ITM marketable limits? And so on..
  • #7,152
  • Apr 6, 2011 4:47pm Apr 6, 2011 4:47pm
Justin. I have to agree about the slow execution, this is not a small matter and should be dealt with asap, it's certanly not the client's internet connection that is somehow not functioning, so give me a brake,
I suggest you take a look at your own liquidity,
it's gone so far that I had to stop scalping because with executions over 5 secs it's just not possible to scalp profitable,
I also like to know how many banks there is in the system.
I like to see you getting better at this in the future or I will be forced to leave MBT
Bulls are stupid Animals!especially when Im short!
  • #7,153
  • Apr 6, 2011 4:56pm Apr 6, 2011 4:56pm
Quoting PoundTrader
can you tell me how many banks? im not asking for the names just the number of banks you have in your system
PoundTrader,

It is over a dozen. Some of them come in jointly through a single feed, etc., so it depends if you count them as one or a few in those cases, but it is more than a dozen if you count some of the “groups” as one. I’m actually working on seeing if we can’t disclose this more specifically, we are reviewing some of the contract terms.
  • #7,154
  • Apr 6, 2011 5:16pm Apr 6, 2011 5:16pm
Quoting smittens4212
Following this thread and comparing the reviews, both pro and con, to my own experience with MBT, I just can't help but feel that a lot of the problems have more to do with customer incompetance than legitimate broker side issues.

Considering the amount of fake complaints, errors that aren't really errors (daily rollover, for example-- we all know it's coming, no excuse if you get hit), etc. it's difficult not to take a lot of these posts with a grain of salt. When someone posts some 'problem' that cost them, Justin comes in and says there...
Smittens4212,

Thank you for the post. I can’t stress enough that we know from experience exactly what you are saying. The idea that some brokers are perfect and some aren’t is just nonsense when you realize that even the “exchanges” have tech problems from time to time, and we plug into most of those, so we know exactly what you are referencing there. Our operation is not just FX. We have stocks, options, and futures, with connections to all of those plus the banks for FX, all through a routing technology, etc. This forum is specific to the forex piece, of course, but it barely scratches the surface of the complexity of all of our systems. The funny thing is, most FX brokers (not all, but most), are just that: an FX broker. And most are just deal desks. That makes for much simpler technology. Try to offer stocks, futures, options, and forex via STP and ECN and connect and maintain routing for proper hours to 20 exchanges in the US and abroad, plus all of these banks, and the idea that our IT department is somehow not qualified is ridiculous. We handle things far more complex than most of the retail FX brokers out there.

Having said that, I agree that downtime should be kept to a minimum and should not be the result of repeated issues (i.e. a recurring bug), and we seek to improve when something like that is uncovered, which is best uncovered by people reporting to us with details. There’s nothing worse from my perspective than when I see three posts on this forum that people are experiencing a bug, and then I go over to our support desk when I come in and ask what happened so I can give an open answer, and no one on the support desk is aware that there was any such problem as described at the time. What that means is one of two things: a) the people posting are posting just to do harm to MB (probably working for another broker, I think it’s clear that we’ve seen some MORE of that than usual here lately since we launched the Pay For Limits system, probably for obvious reasons) or b) that no one called in to report it. So maybe there was a problem for 5 minutes. And maybe it was a single trade server or whatever and it was something that fixed itself and our monitoring systems didn’t catch because it wasn’t global. If no one reports it, it would mean that it could happen again. If we get a bunch of calls from people reporting the issue, then we might be able to say (just making up an example), that “look, these people that reported this problem were all connected to this trade server at the time,” and we can monitor that server better for issues, or whatever the case may be. We look for patterns and consistent variables in the reporting of the problem. I remember five years ago, we had a specific issue with a single trade server out of ten that we had running and it meant that people that connected from a certain part of the US, who all attached to that server, were affected and no one else was. Until we had enough information to recognize that the pattern was the trade server, we couldn’t find the problem. Another time, we had people on this thread (again, years ago) all reporting an hour of outage and we weren’t experiencing any issues that we could tell. They were all customers overseas and there was a line problem underwater coming over here. Wasn’t us at all. Details help, it might be us, it might not be, and reporting the issue on this thread does zero to help the problem at that time or for the future because all you are doing is complaining about the problem and not giving us the details to see it and figure out what it is.

And yes, for example, just a few posts ago, I asked someone on this thread that was complaining about problem fills to email me his/her account information in private with the trade details so I could look into the problem. To my recollection, I believe that this is the SECOND time I have asked this person on the thread to do so. I have not heard anything from this person yet, so I can’t verify the problem or work to resolve it, and of course, it remains a possibility that they aren’t really even a customer and that they are just here on the board to try to scare people away from MB. If the person contacts me, I’m happy to look into the situation and report back the findings. If they don’t contact me soon, I will be calling them out next time they complain.

I think the biggest thing that I would note here is that this is the single largest thread on the FF Brokers section in terms of views and hits over the last five years. I think it’s clear that we respond to our customers’ needs openly and help educate them here. And I think it is clear that over the years, that transparency has benefitted both us and our customers, and with that comes the fact that the competition feels the need to try to “bash” us here to put doubt in people’s minds. And, yes, we did have an outage on MT4 about a month ago for three hours that caused some issues. And yes, we do have rollover daily at 5 pm EST for a few minutes and always have. That’s part of operating a system like ours. But I think a lot of the other complaints as described are, as you point out, not always anything legit and certainly if they are, not being reported where it would put us in a position to look and help.
  • #7,155
  • Apr 6, 2011 5:25pm Apr 6, 2011 5:25pm
Quoting roughtrader
Justin. I have to agree about the slow execution, this is not a small matter and should be dealt with asap, it's certanly not the client's internet connection that is somehow not functioning, so give me a brake,
I suggest you take a look at your own liquidity,
it's gone so far that I had to stop scalping because with executions over 5 secs it's just not possible to scalp profitable,
I also like to know how many banks there is in the system.
I like to see you getting better at this in the future or I will be forced to leave MBT
Please private message me your account information and details about some trades that took “5 seconds” and I will look into them and report back to the thread.
  • #7,156
  • Apr 7, 2011 12:47am Apr 7, 2011 12:47am
Quoting fxchant
It doesn't always sit still and give a target to fill your orders. If you want that, try a bucketshop, and good luck.
We obviously want the market to move around, so we can trade it. You have no understanding of the problem.

The problem is not slippage on market orders due to a fast and far moving market, the problem is execution time between when MBT receives my order, and when they execut it, which results in slippage.

This happens when the quotes change very fast, regardless of whether the price actually moves "far". The price could stay in a 2 pip range but if the quotes change fast enough, MBT can't execute your trade.

I'm talking about the STP, not the ECN.

I gave a solution for this and I would like if Justin would comment on my solution or tell me he is working on a solution.

Again, slippage from the market is acceptable, but latency from the time MBT receives my order to the time they execute my order, should be in milliseconds, not minutes. If there is a problem with STP quotes changing too fast, implement a solution like the one I gave or a better one.
  • #7,157
  • Edited 12:58am Apr 7, 2011 12:55am | Edited 12:58am
Quoting jleblang
blueJ,

Can you fill me in a little more on what you mean by that? How does one person’s hotkeys “mess up the whole MBT system”?
sure...

one of your STP liquidity providers can implement a system where there are 2 bids that are competing for best bid, but they are cancel and bid again in quick succession. This could take milliseconds or less.

I'm not saying that they will do this, I'm saying this to make a point.

The slow execution time in fast moving market has nothing to do with the market moving fast and far, it has to do only with the quotes changing too quickly for MBT to hit, and since MBT is always looking for best price, it results in the market possibly moving for a minute or more before you can fill me when the price doesn't even have to move a pip.

Please read my solution suggestion 1 page or so back and comment on it, or tell me you guys are working on it.

Please see my pm about the specifics of that trade. I already know the low down about it, since I spent over an hour talking with over 4 technicians and traders at MBT... what I want is for you guys to tell me that you are working on a solution. Since I suggested one and I know this kind of thing can be implemented, I hope that you guys will indeed take this seriously.
  • #7,158
  • Apr 7, 2011 2:14am Apr 7, 2011 2:14am
Quoting jleblang
Please private message me your account information and details about some trades that took “5 seconds” and I will look into them and report back to the thread.
somehow I knew you was going to say that.
the slow execution of MBT is widely known
so having a look at my acount won't solve the problem
I can understand that you don't want to admit this in public,
the 5 secs was an extrem, but it has happend more than once
the question is, what are you going to do about it on your side?
if you don't have a liquidity problem then it must be badly
configured servers, software,
or something I don't have a clue about.
Bulls are stupid Animals!especially when Im short!
  • #7,159
  • Apr 7, 2011 4:13am Apr 7, 2011 4:13am
Quoting roughtrader
somehow I knew you was going to say that.
the slow execution of MBT is widely known
so having a look at my acount won't solve the problem
I can understand that you don't want to admit this in public,
the 5 secs was an extrem, but it has happend more than once
the question is, what are you going to do about it on your side?
if you don't have a liquidity problem then it must be badly
configured servers, software,
or something I don't have a clue about.
Are you a scalper?
  • #7,160
  • Apr 7, 2011 6:32am Apr 7, 2011 6:32am
Quoting roughtrader
Justin. I have to agree about the slow execution, this is not a small matter and should be dealt with asap, it's certanly not the client's internet connection that is somehow not functioning, so give me a brake,
I suggest you take a look at your own liquidity,
it's gone so far that I had to stop scalping because with executions over 5 secs it's just not possible to scalp profitable,
I also like to know how many banks there is in the system.
I like to see you getting better at this in the future or I will be forced to leave MBT
Hi, Why you scalp with market orders?
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