MB Trading Futures - Introduction

Reporting here.
MT4 Trading not connection. Location is Southeast Asia. GMT +8.00
What is happening?

It's now 10:00 EST and still no connection--going on an hour and a half now! Really??

+1

I shut down and tried to restart it and it kinda looks like liveupdate is trying to run, but it is not working. Now when I try to start MT4 I get the UAC warning saying the program is trying to make changes to the computer (Win7), click yes...then MT4 pops up for a split second then crashes. If I say NO to the UAC prompt, the MT4 window comes up and stays up, but no connection.

Ok just started it up again and this time it is connected.

ok, mine as well, able to connect back to server.

On Wednesday, MBT MT4 was down about 3.5 hours.
On June 20th, it was down about 45 minutes.

Occasionally, it might be down for shorter periods, but this is technology, and glitches happen. I don't know if MBT is better or worse than other live broker feeds, but until recently, I haven't seen enough of a persistent problem to even mention it.

I had a live trade open on Wednesday. Had it been live, I would have been stopped out at the S/L at ~B.E. Had it come up after ~90 minutes, my trade could have been below the S/L, and presumably would have closed ~ -9p in the red. (I would have called MBT to complain but I don't know how that would have been resolved). As it turned out, the feed came up with the trade well in profit, and I made ~30p. (If my trade had closed at B.E., I was looking for a slightly better entry, and it's possible I could have fared even better without the downtime).

I was fortunate to be in front of my screens and knew that the broker was down. I monitored prices on another broker, and luckily I remembered what my entry price was so I had a good idea what was going on. It didn't get so negative that I was concerned. When the trade turned positive, it reached a place of resistance that had it been live, I would have wanted to close it at market price. Fortunately, it came up with prices close to the high, and then a trailing stop went live, and soon after it closed. All the while, I was wondering how MBT would have handled my trade given the down time. The S/L had been set, so I would hope they would honor that price no matter what happened. (QUESTION: Would you, MBT? ) I called the Desk, and was told I could close my trade by voice, but as it was then in profit, I said I'd call back if I saw prices fall. I also had no idea whether my trade would come back live, or would it be closed at B/E. The S/L price was very close to the last price before the server went down. If I gave instructions to "close" a trade but then later found out that it had been closed per the S/L, would I then be live with a short trade that I didn't intend??

What if I had many trades open, and all of various sizes. (This would be common for EA robots). Would I be able to call MBT and have you close trades that I don't even know what the details are?? Do you have a separate database on another machine with the info, or is this all unavailable when your server is down? (If I need to write a program to track and write my live trades into an ascii file for such purposes, let me know now).

How does MBT handle these sorts of things? Downtimes are a real mess, so I'm glad they don't happen very often.



Back to the downtimes and data issues...

What I don't like is the fact that the MT4 history files get missing gaps after such downtimes, and they apparently never get back-filled by MBT.

I rely heavily on geometric chart analysis, including pitchforks, channels, and trendlines. I value the accuracy of the slope and the precision of price intercepts so much, that if some of the bars are missing, the chart is practically worthless to me. When bars are missing, especially 3.5 hours worth, it's a big, big change in accuracy. The effect can last many days, even weeks, before the hit to accuracy has passed. When 2-3 H1 bars are missing, the ramifications to the precise slope extend well into the future.

One of the things I value about MBT is the prices from the ECN data feed. I feel that prices are more accurate compared to other non-ECN broker feeds, and this accuracy is reflected (positively) with the chart measurements I make. Even a 1p difference to a pivot can vary a future price intercept by a lot of pips, even 10p or more. Since I'm looking for extreme accuracy (and I do find it when the data is correct), an error like that is unacceptable to me.

About MBT's data feed, I also like the 120 H1-bars/week. Some brokers close early on Friday, or open late on Sunday, and don't have the same count of bars. (I know that Asia opens a couple hours early on my Sunday, and the feed could be ~122/week, but I'm ok with just 120).

REQUEST: Can MBT please back-fill the missing bars into the MT4 history files? The market was live, so data exists, whether from your sources or from your Navigator server. Just transfer the data into MT4.


RELATED DATA ISSUE:

Separate from the infrequent downtime that affects recent bars, I have to say that all your data prior to 5/24/2009 is CRAP DATA!! Your Daily charts have 5-bars/week, and then abruptly change to what it's supposed to be for a UTC-5 broker which is 6-bars/week.

Because I sometimes compare long-term charts between brokers, sometimes I notice examples where the pivot prices are wildly different (off by even 1100p!) The old MBT data is clearly wrong, because multiple other brokers closely agree.

Example: AUDUSD,Weekly chart. See the lows for 10/05/2008, 10/26/2008, and 01/11/2009. You have lows off by 100's of pips, and it didn't occur on Jan 2009 (yours says 0.53150 vs. true 0.65360, a -1221p error!) but the real low occurred the week of 10/26/2008. Your data has 0.56008, but it should be ~0.60080. (-407p error!!).

This makes the use of your MBT MT4 charts completely useless if it relies upon data that is <= ~2009. I'd like to use it for my geometric chart analysis, but as it is, I have to switch to charts from other brokers.

Fyi, I have tried using the MT4 History tool to edit the bad prices, but as soon as a do a chart "Refresh", the server undoes my edits! Unless someone knows of a solution, the only remedy appears to be that the broker must fix the bad data.

P.S. If this issue sounds familiar, I have mentioned it in the past and made requests to support but got no response whatsoever.

Bottom line questions:
1. If the server goes down and price opens in the red because a server S/L was not executed, do you honor that S/L ?
2. If I call to manage a trade during downtime, do you have a record of all the trade details or am I expected to know it ?
3. If I call and tell you to close a trade, what happens if it turns out that trade had already been closed but I didn't know it ?
4. In general, how do you manage such trade details when the server goes down?
5. Will you please back-fill the missing data gaps in the MT4 history files?
6. Will you please address the accuracy problems (price and #bars) for at least the MT4 data <05/24/2009, and perhaps for later dates if there are glitches.

Thank you,
Pips4life

Hmmm, I don't know if you responded quickly to my post regarding #5 (to back-fill the missing data during the downtime) or if you had already fixed the issue prior to my post but I needed to "Refresh" my charts.

I do know that I just restarted MT4, and I could still see the gaps on my open charts. However, when I opened brand new charts of other timeframes and/or symbols, in many of the charts (not all!) sometimes I didn't see data gaps (good). So back in my existing charts, if I saw a gap, I did a chart "Refresh". The chart in which I did "Refresh" filled in the missing data, but the non-active charts still had gaps. However, doing a "Refresh" in each open chart is apparently filling in the gaps for the June 26 ~20:00-23:30 downtime.

I mentioned June 20th was down "45" minutes. Your data feed still does have a lot of missing bars at the time of rollover for each day. I expect 5-15 minutes or so, but as long as it prints the right number of >= M15 bars, I'm generally ok with it. (I'd love it if M5 were correct also, but I'll live with it).

However, on June 24th, the GBPUSD,M1 data is missing 44 bars prior to 17:48; missing 58 bars prior to 18:02. On M5, these gaps are 8 and 11 bars, resp.

So... you did fix the big 3.5 hour gap during the day on June 26, and I say thanks, I appreciate it.

The gaps at rollover have been a bit large of late. In fact, since Feb 26th when my GU,M1 data starts, there have been 11 gaps >10 bars, only 2 of which were non-rollover times. (These non-rollover times could actually be long periods of true market inactivity, but to know, one has to look at the chart for price gaps; 1 of them looks like downtime; the other could well be quiet-market time).



This data-check does not claim to represent whether MBT was up-or-down over this time period. You may well have had large (>10 bar) real-time gaps, but by now you could have filled in the data (which I do want you to do). For example, the 6/26 downtime ~20:00-23:30 does not appear on this list! The "gaps" can also just be legitimate market-quiet times.

Attached is the indicator I used to find these data gaps. I didn't write it and it's not perfect, as it may not detect late starts on early Sunday or end-of-Friday, but it's good enough to look for problems. (Try using this on Daily/Weekly/Monthly charts. You *will* find gaps, esp. <05/24/2009, which should never happen except perhaps for major holidays.

Its been a very long day, so I'm gonna keep this brief and to the point... if you wish more elaboration perhaps I'll respond if time allows.

For most of your post you discuss the crappy quality of the MT4 history data available and how such crappy backfill/history data affects your careful analysis.

Yes, you are exactly correct the MT4 backfill/history data is not top notch, and yes, less than ideal data has material impact on your analysis.

Trying to be very brief, let me say that this is what you should expect from an MT4 feed.

Brokers are in the brokerage business, not the data business. They provide data as a convenience to their brokerage customers, and they provide a level of data that is as cost effective as possible, and acceptable to a large enough number of traders to have some value to many, but below a quality threshold that some traders require.

Traders that require better data pay for subscription data-feeds like Zenfire, e-signal, etc. Zenfire etc are in the data business... their customers demand top quality data, and nothing else is acceptable. Zenfire, unlike a brokerage, only has data as its product... data isn't an added service to enhance its core product.

MT4 is a fee package provided by brokers that satisfies the needs of a large number of traders, but as traders become more demanding of better data, it is not designed to handle such demands. MT4 can take only one brokers data feed, and it can only look at 1 minute data segments... that's the lowest granularity it can handle out of the box, as deigned... Its pulls its backfill data from a broker maintained database of historical backfill data,
and users are held hostage to the quality of the brokerage data, and the backfill database provided by the broker.

Better analysis software is designed with more demanding traders in mind and is built to handle multiple choices of data feeds, and can accept:

data from a brokerage like the MB data feed,
multiple brokers at the same time, ie, MB's data feed and Interactive brokers data feed at the same time.
Premium subscription data like Zenfire, e-signal etc
or a combination of all of the above, configured however the needs of the trader are met

MT4 was never intended to do that, ... packages like NinjaTrader, that I use, are out of the box.

Data and how it is built,.... the trade offs that are sometimes made and the effects of those trade offs on the raw data can be a large subject, so to keep this brief...

I use NinjaTrader because it seamlessly allows me to build a local historical database that I can edit, and fill from any source at will....

If I am populating an historical database of EURUSD prices from the MB feed and the MB feed went down for a few hours, I simply patch the data myself in my local database with the downloadable raw tick by tick data provided by MB free to its customers for download on the website everyday shortly after 5PM

This would close any missing gaps in a chart that is built by the program pulling the data from my local historical database. My charts don't rely on what ever is in MB's historical database like MT4 does. My charts never quarry MB for historical data.... they only quarry my locally built database.

If I was really demanding and couldn't wait for the historical patch file from MB..., I could configure Ninja to build a chart from my local MB data first, and then go out to third party data from Zenfire say.. and built a gapless chart.

MT4 users are stuck using whatever historical data MB is able to provide. You get what you pay for. With MT4 you get a free package that meets the needs of most customers.... if it is lacking to you, then you should at least CONSIDER stepping up your game and get better tools.

I must agree 100% with Crass here. Mt4 is a one-size fits many type of retail charting and algorithmic trading package. While downtime at any broker is frowned upon, especially anything longer than a couple of minutes during high volatility, it does happen. I along with many other traders personally gave MetaQuotes a piece of my mind when build 500 was forced out. But, one thing that mt4 is not is a data vendor.

Some brokers do [volunteeringly] maintain their own database of historical tick data that is fed to the mt4 platform. But if you must get >99% accuracy in tick collection, you need a dedicated data provider or to maintain your own tick collection. This requires vps using SSD hard drive and low latency to broker, plus additional scripts to collect and store the data. Maybe having a 2nd or 3rd broker with same charts setup on standby would also help, and may be a cheaper/more flexible alternative to a full on dedicated data subscription, which would require a separate charting package (sierraChart, AmiBroker, Multicharts, NinjaTrader, etc) to manipulate the data visually.

MBT growing SPREADs and diminishing LIQUIDITY

Hi Jason,

What happened to MBT SPREADS/liquidity? The spreads for majors almost doubled compared to 2011! The number of new ticks is down about 4-6 times!
Even with pay for limits (limit/market round turn) it is not competitive anymore.

Is MBT planning to improve its liquidity? Or is it going out of business?

thx
f

I appreciate comments from users, but my post for MBT response is still on the table.

Crassius,

You make some good points, and perhaps I will eventually upgrade to better tools. For better or worse, I have many 10's of thousands of line of code written for MT4, so migration for me is no small task, and that's also dependent upon whether NinjaTrader or whatever other tool can even do what I want it to. Do other programs do absolutely everything users want? No, so you ask them for support. Perhaps because you pay specifically for the chart-tool, you have higher expectations from support; even if I don't pay specifically for MT4, I pay the trade commissions, and do feel I have the right to make basic requests of MBT.

With respect to historical data accuracy, I don't think it it too much to ask MBT (or any MT4 broker) to provide generally good/accurate data for certain Daily/Weekly/Monthly charts, and hopefully also H1 & H4. Since my main complaint is with the crappy data < 05/24/2009, only the higher TF charts are of main interest to me. Yes there are times I want to drill down into historical data, and the MT4 server(s) (for any broker) don't provide the old bars below Daily. If it's important enough to me, I'll use a data provider to get it. I doubt I can use it inside MT4 but as you say, MT4 is "free" and doesn't provide for every want-or-need.

I get that there will be a few M1/M5 and possibly M15 gaps on recent data. I don't like it, but it's not so big a deal. MBT fixed the 3.5 hour data gap, so they *are* being responsive to some degree; just not on the much older data. Put it this way... I have a handful of free MT4 DEMO accounts with other brokers, and NONE of them have such crappy historical data as MBT!! When it affects major pivots, and in the example for which I gave details, it can't help but impact my analysis.

Since I *do* have a live account with MBT, I expect no less than just basic accuracy for historical data. Off by a few pips is far, far better than >1200p !!

Vbfjax, I am a bit curious. You say "build 500", so I assume you are referring to MT4, not MT5, yes? MT4 is now at build 509, so I'm curious what about it was a problem? (I did disable one-click-trading, and also turn on the box to "use Alt key to drag trade levels"; and I notice that MT4 updates itself now without much user control, so is that your complaint? If you have links to other threads, thanks).

Ybfjax,


Yes, it was essentially an error and not intentional. The minute that we discovered it, we reported it ourselves to the NFA and moved the funds to where they needed to be. Thus, there wasn’t much of a fine.

Pips4life,

Some of your questions themselves aren’t actually quite on point, so let me try to answer.

1) It depends what the issue is. If our execution systems/bank routing is down, then no, would be the simple answer. There are cases where MT4 server could be down but there is no impact on limit orders, etc. It just depends on where the problem lies. If the problem is in our control, then yes.
2) Again, it depends. If execution is down but the MT4 server is up (based on your posts, I am assuming all your questions are MT4 based, the answers would be different (and better) if you were talking about Desktop Pro), then we can see the account in MT4. If not, then we can only see the account in Desktop Pro, which means we don’t know the same exact details since Desktop Pro does cost averaging.
3) That wouldn’t happen. We would know before we allowed you to close the trade over the phone.
4) Again, you’re implying this is all about one server. Think of it this way. Quotes, executions, MT4…all different servers. Depends what is going on.
5) We back-fill data when there is data. Again, it depends on what was down.

6) Not clear on what you mean on the pre-2009 data, but it also depends on what data feed you are using. If you are on a FREE EXN account, that datafeed did not exist prior to 2009, so anything you see before then isn’t coming from us. Remember that if you pull a history from the datacenter in MT4 for data we don’t have, it pulls from MetaQuotes itself, which is not our data (and usually isn’t really compatible).

Frito,


Our spreads have not increased a bit. Can you please give me an example of what you are seeing?

mt4, build 500 was "hidden" so you didn't realize you were upgraded until the next time you restarted the platform (no advanced warning/notification), and mt4 did NOT have the 'hold alt button to adjust trade levels'. You had to uncheck "show trade levels". Build 509 solved that problem. if you wanted to draw anything or move any existing objects on the chart without being prompted to modify an order. It was an extreme annoyance, among other bugs. MQ actually deleted some forum threads on mql4/5 of people who were attempting some honest discussion on some of the issues.

There was also a compiling issue, but that was resolved with build 506. Build 509 seems to be ok. The forcing of updates seems to be a permanent thing with mq. This is a bad precedent in electronic trading. If they introduce a bug and it affects your EA or indicators on a LIVE account, there is no way to reverse it.

Then there was the issue that mt4 wouldn't start in some cases. And MQ's response (or lack of it) was the most frustrating part.

http://forum.mql4.com/55512 (post 6 and up is where the fun starts)
http://www.stevehopwoodforex.com/php...php?f=6&t=2267
http://helpdesk.commercialnetworkser...barticleid=202
http://helpdesk.commercialnetworkser...barticleid=201
http://forexmagnates.com/metaquotes-...ook-zulutrade/

If mt4/mt5 could be licensed to individual users, the attitude that mq would have would be much different, but that's an entirely different thread altogether.

updates should never be forced onto a trading platform without the trader's permission.

Pips4life,

Can you run your 1-minute missing data check again and let me know what you find?


Thanks

So that's what was going on with MBT, I remember relauching 1 out of 5 MT4 windows and suddenly it asked me to accept some new terms of conditions about one click execution when I was trying to close the order.

I kept declining them every time I tried to close the order until the window disappeared some time later.

I'm curious. What is the Max number of lot that can be opened at one time in MT4? Assuming one has the margin to do so....

I had no issues trading 45 lots

Hi, can MB Trading consider adding a feature to change the opening and closing time a bar is calculated. Or just change it all together. My problem is the Sunday bar (from 5 PM Eastern to 12 AM) which then displays 6 trading days in a week vs. the usual 5. I notice this discrepancy on the MB Trading Meta trader terminal vs. other MT4 data feeds and even the MBT Desktop Pro data feed where the daily bar starts at 5 PM eastern USA time thus displaying 5 daily bars in a trading week. Or at the least can I get an explanation why there is this data discrepancy between the 2 MB Trading platforms.

Thanks,

Joe