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MB Trading Futures - Introduction

  • #9,381
  • May 1, 2012 10:08am May 1, 2012 10:08am
Hi all-

We have found the issue causing some Limit orders to be charged a commission instead of credited. It should be fixed soon and we will notify each client affected and correct all trades that were improperly charged.
  • #9,382
  • May 1, 2012 10:10am May 1, 2012 10:10am
Quoting Traderji
Thanks for posting that link.

I can't believe what I am reading here. So

- their best liquidity providers are exclusive to free exn - CHECK
- vast majority of their customers gone over to free exn - CHECK
- lots of $1000 micro lots in the order book - CHECK
- absolutely crap spreads in every instrument except EURUSD - CHECK
- Crap execution due to all the reasons above - CHECK
- instead of getting paid for limits, customers getting charged - CHECK

Basically only people left in PFL are you, me, the pakistani bank providing liquidity...
TraderJi,
I think you may have over-extended the analysis a bit, but overall, bingo.

1.) LP's can be on both systems, but they must be more active and 'tighter' on the Free EXN as that was a pre-requisite. On PFL, they don't have to be as active as many other LP's are there to make the market as well...I see it as: PFL = lots of LP's less competition as only so many trades occur a day / # of LP's = less transactions and less profit potential where as Free EXN = less LPs / # trades = more transactions and more potential for LP profits.

2.) My assumption is that market order-based traders and EA's have moved to Free EXN. Limit order-based traders still on PFL. Therefore, most market orders on PFL are stop orders rather than the usual ebb n flow of market order-based EA's + discretionary traders. I think we all agree, that market orders move markets, not limits (unless the limits are high freq. updated), so the lack of market orders on PFL means the entire market (MBT accts + LPs) must move and therefore, I MUST be right on market direction. Before, I could be 'kinda' right and get decent best bid/ask fills. **This is the sticking point where we, the day-in and day-out traders, have noted a change in PFL whereas Justin says there is not**

I ramble on and these are just hunches + observations. But sounds like many old PFL and pre-PFL traders are seeing similar results and are similarly unhappy...
  • #9,383
  • May 1, 2012 10:12am May 1, 2012 10:12am
Quoting jmerk
That's just nonsense. I trade on both systems, and I can tell you that there is not any better liquidity on FREE EXN. A tighter spread doesn't mean better liquidity. As someone else said, a broker could set a 0.1 pip spread and not fill you on any real size and that's not liquidity. Also, on a system like this, if the banks are at 1.3000 by 1.3001 and someone puts a bid for a micro at 1.30007, suddenly the spread is 0.3 of a pip, but if you sell, you get filled on a micro and the bid drops 0.7 of a pip. That's not liquidity. I can tell you now that...
Fantastic, this is the kind of information that helps everyone! Many, many thanks! You have surely enlightened me. And you also support Justin's thought that it's the markets that have changed in last 6 months with respect to general market movement, rather than it being MBT inclusive. As I said before, the onus is still on me to be on the right side of the market, so this old dog is learning new tricks...
  • #9,384
  • May 1, 2012 10:13am May 1, 2012 10:13am
Quoting jleblang
Hi all-

We have found the issue causing some Limit orders to be charged a commission instead of credited. It should be fixed soon and we will notify each client affected and correct all trades that were improperly charged.
THANKS!
  • #9,385
  • May 1, 2012 10:13am May 1, 2012 10:13am
Quoting Traderji
What is wrong with that? If the venue has enough liquidity then a retail trader like me should not have any issue getting filled. Some slippage is to be expected but dammit 20 pips? When the entire move was 50pips. Ridiculous.

It has been mentioned before but Pay For Limits has serious lack of liquidity. If you are trading in micro $1000 lots then no problem but try anything more than 1 standard lot and suddenly no fills. That is pathetic.

Also check out

http://www.fxintel.com/live/

Compare the spreads for MBT Free EXN and...

Traderji,

Please private message me your account number with some example trades where you had problems getting filled on “anything over 1 standard lot” and I will research it in detail to see where the problem is.
  • #9,386
  • May 1, 2012 10:13am May 1, 2012 10:13am
Quoting jleblang
Hi all-

We have found the issue causing some Limit orders to be charged a commission instead of credited. It should be fixed soon and we will notify each client affected and correct all trades that were improperly charged.
Thanks Justin for this news. Any ETA ? I place many orders a day, so I stopped trading, waiting this issue to be solved.
  • #9,387
  • May 1, 2012 10:17am May 1, 2012 10:17am
Quoting jmerk
That's just nonsense. I trade on both systems, and I can tell you that there is not any better liquidity on FREE EXN. A tighter spread doesn't mean better liquidity. As someone else said, a broker could set a 0.1 pip spread and not fill you on any real size and that's not liquidity. Also, on a system like this, if the banks are at 1.3000 by 1.3001 and someone puts a bid for a micro at 1.30007, suddenly the spread is 0.3 of a pip, but if you sell, you get filled on a micro and the bid drops 0.7 of a pip. That's not liquidity. I can tell you now that...

That is true. My experience with PFL has not been good. Especially during news like today with the aussie and then cable so if you say things are same over at the free exn then time to start looking elsewhere.
We're all stories in the end. Just try to make it a good one.
  • #9,388
  • May 1, 2012 10:21am May 1, 2012 10:21am
Quoting BroncoCap
2.) My assumption is that market order-based traders and EA's have moved to Free EXN. Limit order-based traders still on PFL. Therefore, most market orders on PFL are stop orders rather than the usual ebb n flow of market order-based EA's + discretionary traders. I think we all agree, that market orders move markets, not limits (unless the limits are high freq. updated), so the lack of market orders on PFL means the entire market (MBT accts + LPs) must move and therefore, I MUST be right on market direction. Before, I could be 'kinda' right...

Spot on.
We're all stories in the end. Just try to make it a good one.
  • #9,389
  • May 1, 2012 10:31am May 1, 2012 10:31am
Quoting ForexQuant
So the trade server actually send your limit order to LP 1st time when bid price touches 1.30000.

I don't think the order has to go back to the LP to be executed. The LP has sitting limit order in the market just like you and if the price match the trade is executed - your account gets debited and ditto for the LP's account.

At least that what an ECN is.
We're all stories in the end. Just try to make it a good one.
  • #9,390
  • May 1, 2012 10:41am May 1, 2012 10:41am
Quoting Traderji
That is true. My experience with PFL has not been good. Especially during news like today with the aussie and then cable so if you say things are same over at the free exn then time to start looking elsewhere.
Well Free EXN is none better. I was slipped 30pips last week in GBPUSD last week and 15pips in USDJPY today. I guess it is better close all your position before big news announcement.

Anyway no complaint from me because i know the risk. But...it is still bloody pain!
  • #9,391
  • May 1, 2012 10:42am May 1, 2012 10:42am
Quoting tradeoffice
Thanks Justin for this news. Any ETA ? I place many orders a day, so I stopped trading, waiting this issue to be solved.
tradeoffice-

It should be fixed at rollover today. However, obviously, we are going to fix all trades that were incorrectly charged instead of credited, so it shouldn't effect your trading. First thing is to solve the problem going forward, then we will address any trades that were incorrectly charged over the last couple of days since the bug appeared. I don't know yet whether they can identify the trades automatically and just fix them all in one blanket action so that it happens quickly or if they have to do them one by one, but it will all get fixed to what it should have been.
  • #9,392
  • Edited 11:19am May 1, 2012 10:50am | Edited 11:19am
Quoting Traderji
I don't think the order has to go back to the LP to be executed. The LP has sitting limit order in the market just like you and if the price match the trade is executed - your account gets debited and ditto for the LP's account.

At least that what an ECN is.
Yes all kind of orders have to send to LP's server for execution for unless it is a client-to-client match. What we see in MB is just a 'quote'.
  • #9,393
  • May 1, 2012 11:08am May 1, 2012 11:08am
Quoting Traderji
I don't think the order has to go back to the LP to be executed. The LP has sitting limit order in the market just like you and if the price match the trade is executed - your account gets debited and ditto for the LP's account.

At least that what an ECN is.
Traderji-

An EXN (ECN) is when customer orders are allowed to sit on a server in house and display to each other and then hit each other, which is a faster execution.

STP is a system that routes to any bank that is feeding to us, based on best price.

We have a dozen banks (or more) in our system, plus the EXN feed. Your order routes to whichever is the best price. But, just to be clear, banks don't sit with their liquidity on our EXN. That's what STP is about. There's no such thing as a broker who has all of the major bank liquidity sitting internally on their system. The banks each have their own systems, and they hold their liquidity there for others to hit.

You might find a case where a broker only uses one bank, so that bank packs liquidity internally for that broker. However, that gives that bank complete control over fills and price, which basically makes it a deal desk providing all of the liquidity for that broker and calling themselves an ECN.

ForexQuant is correct that if you have a Limit Bid on our system and it isn't hit by another trader and then the bank Ask gets to that price, the order cancels off the EXN so that it can route to the bank for a fill. However, you are still supposed to get paid for that Limit since you offered up liquidity and the market came to you. The case of the current issue is different, it is a bug that came up in an upgrade in the last couple of days, and we have identified it. It certainly isn't affecting all trades, just a handful, but obviously people running enough Limit orders will see it on some trades.

No, it isn't part of a conspiracy to discourage you to move to FREE EXN. You guys crack me up sometimes. All I can tell you once again is that the percentage of accounts that have migrated from PFL to FREE EXN are very small. Yes, there are a group of traders on these forums that seem to be active in that sense and open the discussion, but it is a very, very small percentage of our accounts that have switched. The FREE EXN system appeals to a different type of trader.

To address a few things that I have seen recently on these boards.

1) No we don't want everyone to move to FREE EXN to get away from paying for liquidity. We believe very strongly that people that want to add liquidity for other traders on a commission-based plan should be rewarded.

2) No we aren't trying to mess with customers by not offering the FREE EXN plan on Desktop/Pro. Our internal platform was not meant to handle or be able to select from two different price feeds, so it would either require running two completely different sets of trade servers and essentially doubling our backbone, or it requires rewriting how the software works to make it flexible to either plan. The first option is not the way it is going to happen. The second one is being worked on and just takes time. We would like to offer the FREE EXN plan to anyone that wants it. It was simply easier to plug it into a second MetaTrader server as a different quote feed, and we did that to see how it would be accepted by the masses. It has been accepted very well by a NEW GROUP of traders for us, not a cannibalization of our existing traders. Thus, yes, we are deep into the work of making that feed available to those that prefer our platform to MT4.

3) No, our liquidity has not dropped in terms of customers moving from PFL to FREE. In fact, since an update a couple of months ago, speed of execution is faster and customers should be experiencing some of the best executions we have offered to date thanks to some tech improvements with our banking partners. At this point, I would love to have anyone that claims that they have had execution issues for "anything over a standard lot" or "because of a clear drop in liquidity on PFL" to private me their account number and details of the trades. I would be happy to research because it simply should not be the case. Obviously, trading on news is the exception to when things can get choppy, but at any other time, if you are putting in an order to buy 2 standard lots and you don't get a near instant fill, I'd love to see details of it. Either something is wrong with the account or we're missing something on our end, and I would love to research it if there is something to improve because without details, we don't see it.
  • #9,394
  • May 1, 2012 11:29am May 1, 2012 11:29am
Quoting jleblang
Traderji-

An EXN (ECN) is when customer orders are allowed to sit on a server in house and display to each other and then hit each other, which is a faster execution.

STP is a system that routes to any bank that is feeding to us, based on best price.

We have a dozen banks (or more) in our system, plus the EXN feed. Your order routes to whichever is the best price. But, just to be clear, banks don't sit with their liquidity on our EXN. That's what STP is about. There's no such thing as a broker who has all of the major bank liquidity...
Justin,

I believe most of us have a concern that the chance of client-to-client match has reduced significantly since the introduction of Free EXN. Many of us here could feel the difference. We want to earn the spread besides getting paid.
  • #9,395
  • May 1, 2012 11:40am May 1, 2012 11:40am
Hi all-

I want to give you an example of why it is so important to contact myself or our support team when you think you are having a problem. This thread itself is not a support thread. I check it during the day, I post some replies, and I encourage an open conversation about the Forex world and MB's place in it. But, as many of you know, there are a lot of games played on these threads whereby other brokers try to say negative things about us, etc., to discourage people from using us. So you should not assume that just because one person is claiming some big problem that I have reported that to our support team. Without an account number to go off of, it would be useless for me to report it.

So here is the example that I wanted to give. Understand that there are people that still have Windows XP on their systems and run a clean system but have never wanted to upgrade. MT4 was written in the day of Windows XP, so it runs fairly well on XP. The problem is that if you have XP on your system, unless you upgraded your hardware, you have a decade old network card, which isn't fast and no one has written a driver update for in years. Or separate from Windows XP, we can't control whether your ISP has a solid, fast connection with low latency and a low packet drop rate. We're happy to look into these things, and we have tools on our end to start and then other things that we can do with your computer to pinpoint the problem.

So here is my example. Someone on this thread had been complaining that execution times on our MT4 for his EA were up to two minutes. Now, I know that our executions don't take two minutes. If I see someone new post that on this thread, there isn't much for me to do. They had never contacted us directly. I actual private messaged the person and asked them to give me some details. I got the account number.

So he gives us an order ID, and we pull the logs. We found that we received the order at, let's say, 10:35:41 and sent the execution back at 10:35:42, so less than a second. He said it took two minutes. Now, his logs showed that the order was placed by him (manually) at 10:33:50. So, yes, assuming all timestamps are correct, that looks like 2 minutes, but we can clearly see that from the time it was received on our end until the time of execution is only a second, hardly a bad time.

Upon further examination, the login logs for the account showed about 200 logins per day, including one at 10:35:40. Essentially, due to packet loss, his account was not connected to us when he placed the trade at 10:33:50. I don't know if this was because of his ISP or his hardware, but it was happening, and it happened about 200 times per day. So he has his software up, and he places a trade, but two minutes later gets an execution. Thing is, the account managed to reconnect to us at 10:35:40, immediately, sent the trade that had been placed on his end almost two minutes earlier, and then we sent back an execution immediately.

We asked him to sign up and try out a VPS, which we reimburse for three months for free and after that for a very minimal amount of trading. We do this because we recognize that people running EAs or even just people trading Forex in general need a solid connection 24/7. Once he had the account set up on the VPS, he traded for two days and came back to us and said all of the problems were gone.

I offer this up as an example. We're happy to research your issues. We're here for you. If you go to our support team, that's what they are here for, and they are very good at it. If you want to start with me, that's fine, you can private message me or email me and I'll take a look and either do the research myself or get it in the right hands. But you have to understand that this is not a support forum. We know we don't have two minute executions. I can't really do much for someone that comes on this forum and says "I traded with MB all week and most of my executions took two minutes." We want to help. Please let us do so by providing proper information so that we can troubleshoot.
  • #9,396
  • May 1, 2012 11:41am May 1, 2012 11:41am
Quoting jleblang
Traderji-

An EXN (ECN) is when customer orders are allowed to sit on a server in house and display to each other and then hit each other, which is a faster execution.

STP is a system that routes to any bank that is feeding to us, based on best price.

We have a dozen banks (or more) in our system, plus the EXN feed. Your order routes to whichever is the best price. But, just to be clear, banks don't sit with their liquidity on our EXN. That's what STP is about. There's no such thing as a broker who has all of the major bank liquidity...
For those that wonder why I am an MBT Fan Boy, this is why. Taking time to write a thoughtful, complete, and honest response to abundant criticism shows that MBT works to help me/us, the consumer, rather than yield to their own profitability or the LPs. I am the first to admit that I am opinionated, steadfast in belief, and willing to push issues, but as long as MBT is willing and able to deal with me, provide quality executions, and decent customer service, I will remain a loyal supporter.
  • #9,397
  • May 1, 2012 11:49am May 1, 2012 11:49am
Quoting BroncoCap
For those that wonder why I am an MBT Fan Boy, this is why. Taking time to write a thoughtful, complete, and honest response to abundant criticism shows that MBT works to help me/us, the consumer, rather than yield to their own profitability or the LPs. I am the first to admit that I am opinionated, steadfast in belief, and willing to push issues, but as long as MBT is willing and able to deal with me, provide quality executions, and decent customer service, I will remain a loyal supporter.
Hello, BroncoCap. Sorry about my ignorance but do you know if MBT uses Integral or Currenex to aggregate liquidity to their pool ? I searched thru their website, but didn't find anything about that...

Regards,
MrJinks.
  • #9,398
  • May 1, 2012 11:55am May 1, 2012 11:55am
Quoting mrjinks
Hello, BroncoCap. Sorry about my ignorance but do you know if MBT uses Integral or Currenex to aggregate liquidity to their pool ? I searched thru their website, but didn't find anything about that...

Regards,
MrJinks.
Jinks,
No idea, but there was concern a while back that MBT would not release who their LPs are. I could care less, I guess, haven't really pondered the ramifications. My naive assumption was that they set up liquidity agreements with various LPs and have a API/SDK for those LPs to access MBT book and set LP liquidity. Pure speculation, but I think using Integral/Currenex would be a selling point and would be mentioned if either was actually used...maybe...this is a bit over my head...hopefully Justin can answer.

Bronco
  • #9,399
  • Edited 12:14pm May 1, 2012 12:00pm | Edited 12:14pm
Quoting jleblang

...Upon further examination, the login logs for the account showed about 200 logins per day, including one at 10:35:40. Essentially, due to packet loss, his account was not connected to us when he placed the trade at 10:33:50. I don't know if this was because of his ISP or his hardware, but it was happening, and it happened about 200 times per day. So he has his software up, and he places a trade, but two minutes later gets an execution. Thing is, the account managed to reconnect to us at 10:35:40, immediately, sent the trade that had been placed on his end almost two minutes earlier, and then we sent back an execution immediately....
I used to check the connection quality to MB server every day to ensure that latency is in normal stage and no packet losses (You are doom in this game even if you only have 1% of packet losses). However I cannot do it now because you have blocked all ICMP message(So called 'ping') many months ago. I hope you can consider to allow us to ping your server or provide an alternative way. For instance, show the connection quality on desktop pro like what oanda does on their platform.

It is just too late and costly to notice the bad connection quality after we have placed our order.
  • #9,400
  • May 1, 2012 12:06pm May 1, 2012 12:06pm
Quoting jleblang
Hi all-

I want to give you an example of why it is so important to contact myself or our support team when you think you are having a problem. This thread itself is not a support thread. I check it during the day, I post some replies, and I encourage an open conversation about the Forex world and MB's place in it. But, as many of you know, there are a lot of games played on these threads whereby other brokers try to say negative things about us, etc., to discourage people from using us. So you should not assume that just because one person is...
Justin,

I understand what you mean, this forum is not dedicated to support. But I contacted the support team since friday via ticket, phone call and email, and nobody gave me a correct answer about the fee issue.
By posting on the forum, I can check if other traders have the same issue.
In addition, when you contact the support, you never have the same interlocutor and each time you have to re-explain your problem from the beginning.
Justin, I am not with MBT since a long time, but I read some posts on the forum and I see you seem very concerned by helping everyone with his issue, which is truly appreciable.
For the fee issue, I note that you have been faster than the support team to give us an explanation. This is the proof that they have room for improvement.
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