MB Trading Futures - Introduction

Justin,
will GBPNZD ever be trade able at MBT???

@Crassius

Thanks for the pointer. I have had tried before, with Session template, using "Default 24/7", yet it does not work.

I have been trying to learn how to import forex data into metatrader from the zip files downloaded from mb tradings website. But I cant find any directions on how to do it. So my questions are:

1. Step by step instructions on how to import the data into metatrader from the zip files.

2. How to make .csv files into .hst files so you can import the data into metatrader because after you unzip the files they are in csv format.

I greatly appreciate your help on this.

Thanks!

ok i just starting demoing on mt4 i trade on daily candles its 6pm est and still no new candle. Is this a problem? When should expect a new daily candle for MB? Mt4 appear to be online. thx

The History Data files available for download on the MB site is tick data... tick by tick price changes and a time stamp.

One of the many disadvantages to Metatrader is that it can not deal with tick data at all. You can not use the data down to tick by tick granularity, you have one file for 1 minute data, another for 5 minute data etc.

So the answer to your question is, you can't use the downloadable tick data in Metatrader.

However, you shouldn't have to use it... Metatrader will load the historical data from MB's server when you open up a chart.

Issues:

1. The historical data is limited by the MBT server to provide only a recent portion of the data history. If one is looking for M1 or M5 data for, say, a year ago, you're out of luck *unless* you already happen to have that data from watching it live back then, or if you load historical bar data yourself.

2. Suppose you want to look at a few years of Daily bars. Well sure, the MBT server will give you those Daily bars quite a few years back. HOWEVER, the data is CRAP prior to 05/24/2009! Why? Because today the MBT feed is a GMT-5 feed (which I like) which results in 6 Daily-bars-per-week. However prior to the date mentioned, MBT's data just fills in the Daily bars with only *5*-Daily-bars-per-week. A second problem is that there are plenty of missing bars! I'm not talking about just holidays, but several regular trading days for which the data is missing. You can't draw meaningfull Pitchforks and Trendlines using any pivots older than 5/24/2009 because the slope and future price intercepts are way off. The data needs to be consistent across the whole chart, and since it's not, it's crap! ( Complaint: I sent a detailed email Sep 20 to MBT's [email protected] about this issue and another and got absolutely zero response. That's pretty lame support IMO. )

3. Regarding getting the tick data into MT4... first of all, I don't know where on MBT's site to find the tick data although I'm sure the link is buried somewhere in one of these posts. (Anybody?).

I've thought about trying to use the inexpensive ForexTester2 tool to read in tick data and then spit out the .hst files for all the desired timeframes with the appropriate GMT-5 timeshift, and then read it into MBT's MT4. In theory this should be possible, but I've not attempted it and don't really know if it will work. I *really* would much prefer that MBT just do the courtesy to all it's users and convert the tick data into Bar .hst files for all timeframes, going back as far back as possible. Yes the files would be large, but hey, tick data files are big too, right?

While on the subject, I'd like MBT to fix the crappy H4 and Daily bars prior to 5/24/2009 so that when they get auto-loaded from the MBT server, they are correctly spaced (6-Daily's-per-week; 31 H4-per-week) and none of them are missing.

Hi there, I trade on MBTrading few months via MBTDesktop pro. Overall platform is OK, execution superb, only two things:

1. Chart are realy slow... freezing... there is some data problems or what? History Server errors? I must use another chart provider instead and for me overall its no problem... but guys please do something with this. such a nice platform You have... its treasure with black spot on it.

2. Support.
I have to say You guys have no support at all. what is this WAITING.... I am very dear client to You but please wait... 15 guys before You pls wait... or I should call from europe via phone and pay money to get answer or solution.... or write email and wait few days for answer...pls make a good support.

Of course I can use Multicharts, Ninja and others and try to find solutions on google but just as Your valuable client I am eager to help You improve.

Kind regards

Donatas

Pips4life,

Sorry to hear about the troubles. I had one of our support reps pull all emails to [email protected] on September 20, and although there were plenty, none were asking about your issue, so it appears we did not get any email from you. That email address typically answers all emails within an hour. Please contact me in private and forward me that email and I will get it into their hands. I’m not saying that there is necessarily anything we can do about the older data, but support would be the one to talk to.

Pips4life,

Also, you can download Tick Data in the Client Secure Area of our site. Just log into the website and it is in the tools menu.

Meshka,

Is your account with our US office or UK office? UK office has a phone number in UK that might be more convenient. I’m not sure about the wait times you say you are experiencing. Right now, I’m looking at the queue and calls and chats are being answered inside of one minute. However, you can use email and you will get a response that day, usually very quickly.

Ok today I tried Your support chat and to my surprise I get quick answer
jleblang do You shouted loudly in Support DEpt. today or what? anyway its a step further..
but what about charts freezing?

Donatas

Tick data can be used both as FXT files to improve the strategy tester quality, and as hst files. Most of the software to do this can be found at http://eareview.net/tick-data

You can get the MBT tick data at https://www.mbtrading.com/clientArea/TickDownload.aspx
after logging in.

You will need the MQ4 script dukas2fxt.mq4. To use that script you must first convert the MBT csv files into DukasCopy csv format. That can be done in Excel, but it takes forever if the tick file is large. Or you can write a VB app to do the conversion.

MBT format is
'Symbol, Time, Bid, Ask'
Dukas format is
'Date/Time,Bid,Ask,BidVol,AskVol'

You have to fake the volume. Just set it to 0 since it is not used in MT4.

It can be done, but it is a lot easier just to use DukasCopy tick data which may be cleaner in any case.

I just noticed this change today...regarding the naming of the Free "former ECN".

I thought it was a "typo" on FX Intelligence when glancing at spreads earlier.
But from the bottom of a webpage at MB's site...

"Additionally, the NFA has changed its definition of a Forex ECN such that brokerages
that accept retail customers cannot be deemed an ECN."

I've spent a few minutes on Google, and the NFA and CFTC site... but to no avail.

I'm curious about what the new "ECN" definition is... and why it cannot include us "little guys/gals".
More dumbass legislation... MBT has been one of the few innovating brokers, I hate to see any setbacks
...even if it is just nomenclature.

Long live the EXN then ...

The latest and greatest from a regulatory agency headed by a man who has to recuse himself from the investigation into the theft of customer funds that by CFTC regulations are supposed to be segregated at MF Global.

They can't even enforce such a basic regulation, yet they have time to for this crap.

It has long seemed to me that there is a concerted effort at the CFTC to kill off retail spot FX and steer that business onto the futures exchange.

What a huge step backward for the retail FX trader.

Its just a letter in an acronym - who cares..

But, truth be told, MB's EXN does infact not work like a traditional stock-trading ecn, like arca or island. Justin has explained somewhere in this thread how the routing out to LPs works, and that is decidedly not how these stock ecns work. Maybe thats the reason the NFA considers it 'misleading marketing' ?

Shrike,

Our “EXN” technology works the same way that a stock ECN did. We accept a customer limit order, it sits on a server, it is displayed to the market, and customers can hit each other on it when those prices are the best price at the time.

That is different from our execution technology, which takes your order and routes it to where it should go. If it is a Limit order, it puts it on the EXN. If it is a Stop order, it monitors price until that price hits and then fires a market order. If it is a market order, it looks over both our customer orders on the EXN and our banks and routes to the best price. People confuse the general execution process with the EXN (formerly ECN) itself. You aren’t just trading with other customers (that would be the EXN piece). You order gets routed to a customer OR a bank depending on which has the best price.

The difference between the stock ECN world (as you said, Arca or Island) and this is the following. Arca and Island didn’t have retail customers. They were just the ECN piece. Orders sat on their servers and interacted, but those orders came from broker-dealers that chose to send their customer orders there.

What the NFA/CFTC have settled on here is that a firm that has retail customers isn’t the ECN because the ECN is supposed to be just the place where the orders sit and meet. I’m not going to comment on what I personally think about the distinction, but that’s the deal. Since we have customers AND we have the ECN technology AND we have our own execution technology that routes your order to either a bank or another customer on our ECN servers, we can’t call ourselves an ECN (the way I view it is that we do so much more anyway). So, we’ve changed the name of what our technology that handles that is to more accurately reflect what that piece does, and I think you’ll see some changes soon to highlight that even more. In terms of how it works, NOTHING has changed. Like you said, it’s a name change, a letter in an acronym.

And if I may further clarify, let’s talk briefly here about the two different pricing plans because BOTH of them utilize the EXN technology.

On the Pay for Limits plan, we have our raw bank spreads and the limit orders sitting on the EXN servers. The quote that you see on that plan, the bid is the best bid out of all of the banks and the EXN and the ask is the best ask out of the same. You place an order, and effectively, all orders end up being marketable or limit orders. In other words, when you place a stop, once the price hits, that stop becomes a market order. Etc. So, on the PFL plan, if you send us an order where the result is that we have to route your order to hit a bank or hit a customer’s Limit order sitting on the EXN, then you pay us a routing fee, currently 2.95 per 100k, for doing so. If you send us a Limit order that is not a price that we can execute immediately (i.e. a sell above the bid at any level or a buy below the ask at any level), that order is sent to the EXN immediately to sit there until someone else’s order hits it. Your price will reflect immediately in the PFL quote. If someone does hit that order while it sits on the EXN, you get filled, and we pay you, currently 1.95 per 100k. We’re simply encouraging people to put their orders up as it adds liquidity via the EXN to other customers on our system, and EXN executions are the fastest because they are sitting right here.

On the Free EXN plan, we take quotes from our biggest banks and then we insert a small mark-up on the fly to whatever the best cumulative bid/ask is. We still route your trade out to the bank that is the best bid/ask at the time, we just keep the difference and we don’t charge you a fee, so the price you get is your net. This helps some people who prefer to know their net cost based on the spreads. But, even with that system, we still allow you to use the EXN technology on a separate server. Your Limit orders still post to the EXN WITHOUT any mark-up, so everyone can still see your bid or ask exactly at your price, and they can hit it. So in that system, if you have Limit order on the EXN and another customer hits you with a market order, you both get that price, neither one of you is charged a fee or paid for the limit, and we just make nothing on the trade.

So the EXN technology is used as it should be for either plan to help customers get their orders reflected to the market and to tighten spreads. We just give you the flexibility to pick which pricing model you like best. Some people like to know their all-in costs in the spreads, and some people like to have the tighter spreads to trigger their orders and then pay the routing fee, plus the bonus of getting paid on your Limits, like a Take/Profit in MT4, etc.

But again, to be clear, nothing at all has changed about how it works.

That sounds like a reasonable definition. When you route out orders, you give up control over the execution process, effectivly giving the LPs 'last look' capabilites. Potentially leading to adverse effects for clients - like a stop being filled at the worst possible price during extreme market conditions. IIRC; you yourself did describe the process somewhere in this thread. And customer-to-customer (ECN) execution must be a very small part of MB's trading.

I have google-searched the currenex.com website, and they dont use the term ECN. Hotspot however does, it will be interesting if the NFA will enforce this for all of the firms or just a subset.

I needed help closing a partial fill on Navigator Pro this morning. (a few minutes ago, ~9:45am EST)

I haven't called the order desk in ages (I think I did when I traded futures about 3 years ago).

Approximate wait time was like 15 seconds literally.
Eric picked up and closed my position as I asked.
The whole process was very quick!

Nice job MBT!

Hi all
a complete newbie here in regard to MBT
I have an NT7.8(Lifetime license) & just started a demo of Navigator version 11.8.0.38 which is the one for NT at the moment
The help I am seeking is if I place an order with an NT strategy with Stop & Target attached to MBT & the order is filled do the Stop & Target orders rest on MBT servers or my PC?
As I am from Australia & taking into account internet factors I would be very apprehensive about them residing on my PC particularly the STOP order.
Also can some one advise whether the NT Navigator version can take advantage the "Pay for Limit Orders"?
Regards jmacn

Hey Pips4Life,

The tick data can be obtained from MBT by logging to their website (www.mbtrading.com) and then go to TOOLS and you will see the tick history.

But however, tick data history is only for 2011.

Regards
Keiran