Smart Live Markets - Spread Bet on MT4

[WilteredFire]

any updates on the Ping testing

Im posting an update in just a moment with some info that peeps might find helpful...I'll try hunt down some more info over this week to see If it can give us all some more insight.

why do their job for them?

you wouldn't do your mates job for free would you?

I have a server. In a data centre. Optimum connection. Most of us on here are techies anyway.

its not us.

I appreciate what you said, but im not trying to do their work for them but rather just spend a little time trying to post results of my pings/latency tests so we can see its not a problem from my end but rather their end, if a few people do this then hopefully it may get them to get their act together and get on with spending proper time fixing the problem which will benefit us all. I know where your coming from though bro.

 

[WilteredFire]

So...First after closing all programs that require the net I made sure nothing apart from MetaTrader was running, went to the command prompt from the Start > Run menu and then typed in "netstat -n" without the quotes, and it showed Mt4's connection, its listed as "Established and shows an IP address connected to port 443 which is the Port Mt4 will use to send/receive data.

SLM's IP address for the server its connecting to through the MT4 terminal is 89.16.250.40 from what I gather as thats the only active connection showing up on port 443...

If anybody wants to double check and make sure this is their mt4 servers IP just netstat -n from your command prompt when your Platform is open and it should show you that IP.

Now...From Sunday's opening and throughout the Day today, in the command prompt typing in ping 89.16.250.40 is showing me, with 4 ping's...their server is replying back to me with an average of 23 to 63ish milliseconds...The slowest single ping reply was this afternoon which took 213ms to reply back from the server.

The IP belongs to a hosting company by the name of Sohonet.co.uk with the server in Westminster, London if the info is correct.

Now...Running various Tracer Route tools is showing me that talking to the server and getting back to me it's going through an average of 13 to 16 different nodes or whats called 'Hops'. That sounds like a fair amount to me? The Traceroute with different tools are all showing that the data is being sent from the UK all the way just before Chicago in the US, and then coming back to Sohonets network. Should it be taking this many hops just to sent Data from Leicester to London with ping times of 50ish ms? Maybe SLM need to look into this more.

Heres my result from PingTest.net to show my connection is fine, its able to send pings to a server around 100miles away from me to Maidenhead, from Leicester where I am, quite quickly...



So, my connection seems fast enough, no problems reported by my ISP either, router/firewall etc all optimum...Generally the pings are taking 50-60ish milliseconds to talk to SLM's IP. Im interested to know if they can do something to cut this down to under 20ms as its not uncommon to find brokers within the US for instance who have Latency times as low as 5-10ms which gives their clients real fast execution and minimal slippage/requotes etc.

Would others be kind enough to share their Ping/Latency results by getting onto pingtest.net and sharing their end result through the generated link, and also by going onto yougetsignal.com/tools/visual-tracert/ and traceroute SLM's IP to see how many hops on average it appears to take to reach their IP address? Please try post your City, what ISP you're with with what mb connection.

My average ping times: 23ms at the quickest to contact SLM's IP, but mostly around 50-60ms
City: Leicester
ISP: Virgin Media with 20mb broadband.
Traceroute Hops: between 13-16 hops.

Sorry for the long post, if we can just get a few people to post up their results maybe we can get an idea.

 

[WilteredFire]

Just to add...It would be interesting to see if anybody physically close to London are able to get better ping times and how many hops they are getting in their Traceroute results. Hope I haven't drawn any wrong conclusions in my above post, just looking for more info, and hoping someone techy from SLM can enlighten us to help straighten out the record. Thanks guys.

 

[SimonK]

Just for the hell of it, here's my ping test. I live 10 miles from central London.



This is my traceroute of the IP address you gave above. Again, it went via the States and did 16 hops in 1.8 seconds.

http://my.jetscreenshot.com/6325/20110705-8vyc-89kb

 

[jimmc]

So...

Would others be kind enough to share their Ping/Latency results by getting onto pingtest.net and sharing their end result through the generated link, and also by going onto yougetsignal.com/tools/visual-tracert/ and traceroute SLM's IP to see how many hops on average it appears to take to reach their IP address? Please try post your City, what ISP you're with with what mb connection.

Interesting work WiltedFire. My average Ping response at the moment is 47ms. That's with quite a few other things running (demo platform as well 89.16.250.25:443, and radio 2). I'll do proper tests later when I have more time.

I'm interested to run these tests at 06:15 in the morning which is when we seem to get a lot of connection errors using an EA (though not this morning). I might run it as a scheduled task and log the results. Who knows, maybe the ping will wake up the connection before MT4 tries to connect.

 

[alcando]

SLM has been incredibly rubbish lately. I complained on all of their help services yesterday and got no response. However is it just me or is the platform actually working properly today... No re-quotes yet.

Could it be that they are only mildly useless?

 

[Macd41]

I may be fortunate but I have had no problems in the past six months (I'm using a VPS).
I usually have three or four trades/day

 

[Black Swan]

Was talking to a Director at an ECN broker this morning, we got on to the subject of what brokers' 'dealers' can do with meta trader if they can intervene/don't have a bridge etc..how they can accept/reject/re-quote/move price on any trade...

I reckon a lot of you guys are having your eye wiped, you were egged on by the inexperienced (getting way too excited over meta trader + SB-ing) and a couple of paid for sock puppets..

 

[Pat494]

just my tuppeny on MT4.

I had a look at it and........

The programming language looks like Greek to me
The origin is Moscow, so if there is a legal dispute - forget it
There is no adequate primer on the MQL programming language - might be one in Russian but I don't think I have enough time left on this planet to master both

 

[Mata Nui]

It is kind of hard to be positive about the future of an MT4 spreadbet platform (or the continued use of MT4 at all). MT5 is a USA only product and unless the rest of the planet decides to follow US rules on hedging etc it will always be. This sort of means MT4 is getting end of life really.

 

[geewcee]

Average ping for me is 55ms, live in Yorkshire and only have 2mb broadband at the moment (Virgin account piggybacking off some old BT lines)

 

[Pat494]

just my tuppeny on MT4.

I had a look at it and........

The programming language looks like Greek to me
The origin is Moscow, so if there is a legal dispute - forget it
There is no adequate primer on the MQL programming language - might be one in Russian but I don't think I have enough time left on this planet to master both

If I was going to have a serious go at programming then I would choose NinjaTrader with its C# language. Loads of books around on C# too. And written in English ( well American English, which is similiar, sort of )

 

[Baby Clanger]

If I was going to have a serious go at programming then I would choose NinjaTrader with its C# language. Loads of books around on C# too. And written in English ( well American English, which is similiar, sort of )

"There is no adequate primer on the MQL programming language" ???

Try:
http://docs.mql4.com/

The MQL programming language is a basic language and does the job. C# is a much more sophisticated language.

Your choice is simple, if you use MT4 use MQL, if you use NinjaTrader use C#. Your selection based on language is irrelevant.

 

[Mata Nui]

If I was going to have a serious go at programming then I would choose NinjaTrader with its C# language. Loads of books around on C# too. And written in English ( well American English, which is similiar, sort of )

C# is a very 'pretty' language to work with. Like many others (including MQL) its derived from c so once you know how to use one c derived language you can pick up others quite quickly. The problem isnt the syntax, its the framework. for example:

for (int i = 0; i < 10; i++)
{
...
}

is an example of a loop in c#. Its also exactly the same as mql. The syntax for both languages is almost identical. The frameworks behind them though are worlds apart.

 

[Pat494]

"There is no adequate primer on the MQL programming language" ???

Try:
http://docs.mql4.com/

The MQL programming language is a basic language and does the job. C# is a much more sophisticated language.

Your choice is simple, if you use MT4 use MQL, if you use NinjaTrader use C#. Your selection based on language is irrelevant.

adequate ? - I don't think it is nearly adequate and yes I did find it but that's about all there is.

Therefore the selection of language is relevent - to me anyway

The downside of NT is the cost of intraday + data feed

An SB company might carry that cost too, like tax

 

[Baby Clanger]

adequate ? - I don't think it is nearly adequate and yes I did find it but that's about all there is.

Therefore the selection of language is relevent - to me anyway

The downside of NT is the cost of intraday + data feed

An SB company might carry that cost too, like tax

But if you can't afford the NT data feed then you have no choice, decision made. I would love to use NT, the back testing system is excellent, but can't justify the cost of the feed so I use MT4.

I'm writing my own indicators for MT4 including DLL imports written in C and Pascal only using what I've found on the Internet, so the knowledge is out there.

And as Mata Nui mentioned earlier, both languages are very similar anyway.

 

[Ross Spur]

adequate ? - I don't think it is nearly adequate and yes I did find it but that's about all there is.

Therefore the selection of language is relevent - to me anyway

The downside of NT is the cost of intraday + data feed

An SB company might carry that cost too, like tax

Some US brokers offer free NinjaTrader Direct, which is a stripped down version of the program -- but still in another league to most SB platforms.

 

[thruster9121]

More requotes this morning for me and a friend. Wasn't even during a fast moving market.

Closing account today. FXCM is looking tempting.

Moving to FXCM in favour of SLM, blimey they must be bad

On a serious note, I left SLM a couple of months ago due to the same issues that traders STILL complain about today. I have experienced the pain of trading with a few MT4 dealing desk brokers, so I have come to one sound conclusion; I should have opened an account with an ECN broker from the start. When I switched from SLM to an ECN it was like a breath of fresh air, quite a profitable one too.

Tax free 'trading' on MT4 is appealing, but if that means you lose money or make a pittance, it really isn't worth the heartache. If you have a small account and you are making under 10k a year, spread betting has no positive benefits over trading the real market anyway! In any case, if you were trading with a 10k account, would you risk that capital with SLM and it's constant requotes and price feed freezes?

Don't put up with the rubbish service, requotes and other usual issues from SLM. Close your account and move to an ECN, you'll be glad you did. I will NEVER go back to a dealing desk broker, end of story! There are some really good ECN brokers out there, commission free with variable spreads. A few allow you to open an account with £500 and allow lots of 0.01 (10p). If anybody wants to know who I deal with, pm me.

 

[alan5616]

Reluctant to go to FXCM until the outcome of their court case.

Wise decision, especially when one reads details of the complaint.

They're, certainly one of the largest retail spot forex brokers in the world so, It doesn't inspire confidence in the rest of them. What pisses me off is that all these brokers and SB companies still come out with the same fairy story that they've been spouting for the past 25 years.

The spiel goes something like this. "We make our money from the spread only and don't manipulate prices or trade against our clients".

 

[StealthTrading]

Just closed my SLM account.

Going with Alpari Pro for prices trading through ProSpreads.

SML are just out to grab your money, requotes so they can get you late in positions and then take the opposite side. It's a joke. Move away form spreadbetting and go DMA and pay the commission least you get to trade reall prices from the market and not made up prices like SML.