thewhizkid
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Mostly depends on your trading style. If you do a lot of Limit orders, Pay for Limits is probably the better choice. I would say anything over 50% Limit orders. Otherwise, the spreads on FREE EXN can't be beat, and they now offer that on their main platform, not just MT4. Their Desktop Pro platform, once you learn how to use it (hint: take their webinars) is easy yet powerful. The order types give you a lot of control.
This link will allow you to watch live spreads of at both MB Trading Free and MB Trading Pay For Limits.
Be sure and watch during the hours you actively trade. The Pay For Limits is very good during the European and European/New York overlap.
During active hours.... which is all I trade, and I only trade EUR/USD.... I pay on average across all my orders .7 pips when all is said and done.
If you can't beat a spread that tight...... find another game.
FX Intelligence Analyzer: Compare live spreads and quotes from multiple brokers
Be sure and watch during the hours you actively trade. The Pay For Limits is very good during the European and European/New York overlap.
During active hours.... which is all I trade, and I only trade EUR/USD.... I pay on average across all my orders .7 pips when all is said and done.
If you can't beat a spread that tight...... find another game.
FX Intelligence Analyzer: Compare live spreads and quotes from multiple brokers
Shakone
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MB trading looks great in terms of spreads and costs. I think it is better than quite a few, unfortunately, it's not as good as it looks. I prefer to trade with Interactive Brokers.
When I traded with MBTrading, there were too many downtimes, and the downtimes were highly inconvenient. For 3 days in a row the entire platform went down from around 1pm until shortly after 3pm. If you're trading forex, you'll realise this is a key time in terms of announcements. it wasn't just that week, as this re-occurred again weeks later. It's too much.
Also, while conceptually it's nice to paid for limits, in practice, you're often losing out by doing it. I don't want to get too into this point, but forex is not futures, and getting filled on the bid and ask is not what typically happens.
When I traded with MBTrading, there were too many downtimes, and the downtimes were highly inconvenient. For 3 days in a row the entire platform went down from around 1pm until shortly after 3pm. If you're trading forex, you'll realise this is a key time in terms of announcements. it wasn't just that week, as this re-occurred again weeks later. It's too much.
Also, while conceptually it's nice to paid for limits, in practice, you're often losing out by doing it. I don't want to get too into this point, but forex is not futures, and getting filled on the bid and ask is not what typically happens.
As I have written about MB Trading else where on this site, the MT4 implementation is riddled with problems, has frequent breakdowns reported by customers and one should not use that platform with Mb Trading. They had to do extensive reworking of the MT4 code, some source code of which they do not have access to and the whole thing is a big mess, IMHO.
They have written on their site about the changes they had to do to MT4 to make it "work" in a non-deal desk environment, so you can go there and read all about it. MT4 is a piece of junk anyway, and you'd be better off avoiding it wherever you go, but judging from the volume and persistent complaints generated by MT4 customers on the MB Trading support board I read regularly, it is just flat out too unstable to ever risk in live trading with MB .
I use DeskTop for order entry and management and chart using NinjaTrader. I have traded with them everyday since January of 2009, and have not experienced any outages that were more frequent or lasted longer than I would expect given the time span. Entire exchanges have outages from time to time... The Liffe exchange had an outage just this past Friday, for example. But my experience is because I use MB's own, in house designed and maintained platform. Had I been on MT4, my experience would be very different.
Interactive Brokers is a fine outfit. If you are trading in enough size, they are a great alternative to MB.
However, review IB's commission schedule carefully. They do not scale down their commissions for smaller lots the way that MB Trading does. IB has a minimum charge, that gets prohibitively expensive as your size and volume get smaller. Review what your costs would be to trade your planned size and volume at each house before making a decision. Small players, or people testing systems in a real money environment will be priced out of Interactive Brokers. If you are trading enough size and volume, IB may be a better choice than MB.
Shakone
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Just to be clear, I wasn't using MT4. I was using their own MB desktop as you mention and using ninjatrader, just like you were Crassius, and it was more recent than Jan 2009. A platform going down for more than an hour, at vital times like I mentioned on several occasions is just poor to trade on. And I was trading forex there. Trading is hard enough, without having this too.
I'm not suggesting IB is perfect, just pointing out a few issues I've had with MB Trading. As I said, I think you can do worse than MB Trading, particularly for small size, but don't be fooled by the pay for limits. There is no free lunch here. Price will move all the way through your entry before you get fully filled on your limit.
And spreads are misleading. Typically the spread for EURUSD was about 0.9. However, if you use one of these spread analysers (like the link you gave), you should be aware, that on places like MB Trading you will often have say
...............................1.23579 (1 million size)
...............................1.23577 (1000 size)
1.23574 (1000 size)
1.2357 (1million size)
And so the spread analyser will say that the spread is 0.3 at this time, but really it's not, it's 0.9 unless you're trading 6p a point. Something to be aware of.
I'm not suggesting IB is perfect, just pointing out a few issues I've had with MB Trading. As I said, I think you can do worse than MB Trading, particularly for small size, but don't be fooled by the pay for limits. There is no free lunch here. Price will move all the way through your entry before you get fully filled on your limit.
And spreads are misleading. Typically the spread for EURUSD was about 0.9. However, if you use one of these spread analysers (like the link you gave), you should be aware, that on places like MB Trading you will often have say
...............................1.23579 (1 million size)
...............................1.23577 (1000 size)
1.23574 (1000 size)
1.2357 (1million size)
And so the spread analyser will say that the spread is 0.3 at this time, but really it's not, it's 0.9 unless you're trading 6p a point. Something to be aware of.
I collect and store tick data from MB Trading 24 hours a day, 5 1/2 trading days a week and have since January of 2009. I have alarms set in the computer program to wake me up if there are technology issues...either on my end or MB's. I am accutely aware of service disruptions on MB's part or my own ISP's...
Yes, there have been a few outages during that entire time span. I never claimed there were not, I simply said none that were longer or more frequent than one would expect.
One has to accept the fact that internet connectivity and electronic trading carry with it the inevitable service disruption.....
Entire exchanges go down from time to time, because there is no such thing yet on this planet as 100% up time.
The entire Liffe exchange just recently went down, for example,
http://www.efinancialnews.com/story/2011-08-04/nyse-euronext-technology-woes-mount
Just now as I write this the Thomson Reuters Matching Service has come back online after an outage.
Thomson Reuters FX Trading Platform Suffers Outage
Such disruptions are a fact of life and unavoidable where ever you go.
When such an outage occurs one simply manages any positions you have on via telephone, which is always available.
I don't post this to argue, and will not respond farther. The only purpose of this post is to inform anyone who may come across the discussion in the future. This is my opinion, others may disagree. The reader can take it as one opinion and weigh it with the many others he/she will hear.
This is well put, Crassius, and I agree with you. If you research any forex brokers, you'll find that all of them suffer from the same tech issues at some point or another. Some are obviously better at dealing with the customer communication than others (in my experience anyway) but at the end of the day, you really do need to expect this stuff to happen to some degree.
Also, there's never a good time for tech issues to happen, but for an individual trader, it always seems like the broker is trying to screw you over because it inevitably happens at the worst possible time. But as you said, that's just part of the game. It's why brokers have the fine print disclaimers on their websites!
I've felt that MB has done well on the customer service side when I've needed help or questions answered. I also think that because they are constantly offering new plans (like free exn and so forth), that they are more in line with what traders want as opposed to being out to screw their customers over to make a few extra bucks. It seems to me they will be in business longer and be more successful at it by helping their traders rather than robbing them.
how frequent is the downtime in Desktop and Ninjatrader compared to MT4?
would you not recommend MT4 even for charting purposes?
Without running them side by side for a longtime and collecting definitive data it is not possible to answer exactly.
I would venture to guess that if you compare the complaints of trouble reported on MB's support thread at Forex Factory, at least 85% are from MT4 customers.... maybe even 90%.
Part of this is caused by the fact that most new FX traders use MT4... it's free, seems to the uninformed to be what everyone is using, and they just don't know any better.
With a higher proportion of new traders using MT4 over the many other platforms one can use with MB, you inevitably get complaints that really are from people that don't know what they are doing.... User caused errors etc.
Even so, MB's implementation of MT4 at this time is so often at fault, that I would advise against using it. At all. Ever.
Learn how to use DeskTop if you want a free platform on MB, or use one of the many other paid platform choices that are compatible.
There are many other reasons not to use any implementation of MT4 anywhere.... it really is a poor platform for a number of reasons...
Thank you all for your insightful responses and resources. I was comfortable with using MT4 and didn't even have too many complaints, but after reading your responses I switched to MBT DeskTop Pro and it's such an improvement! I've stuck with the FREE EXN plan instead of the Pay for Limits as it's more suitable for my trading style.
Thanks again!
Thanks again!
Glad to hear it. The time you invest learning a new software package becomes a new skill that will continue to pay you back over and over again.
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