Question about Strategy Trader, MT4, and Tradestation

L

Larryparker

Hello,

I am interested in possibly automating some Forex Intraday trading strategies. For anyone who has successfully developed and utilized automated intraday trading strategies for Forex, I have the following questions:

1. For FXCM, which is better for developing automated intraday trading strategies: Strategy Trader or MT4?

2. Which platform is better at executing such strategies of the above two?

3. In order for you to be able to successfully run an automated FXCM trading system (intraday), what minimum technical specifications, in terms of memory and hard drive space should your computer have?

4. Eventually, I plan to move up to trading index futures contracts and such intraday using Tradestation. How reliable is that platform?

I would tremendously appreciate any experiences you have with the above software programs or any suggestions.

Thanks very much,

Larry
 
I've used MT4 to automate Forex strategies and it's fairly straightforward and pretty reliable.

The only gotcha with MT4 is that it cannot process two or more orders at the same time and the 2nd will fail. If you are trading two or more instruments at the same, particularly if at the same timescale e.g. off hourly bars this will be a problem. I ended up building a queuing mechanism within MQL to overcome this which shouldn't really be necessary.

Still MT4 has a lot of nice features some others don't like handling of timezones, autofilling of missing bars, automatically handling stop and take profit orders etc. These things are essential for a reliable operation and yet some expensive platforms like OpenQuant don't provide them.
 
Quote from Larryparker:

Hello,

I am interested in possibly automating some Forex Intraday trading strategies. For anyone who has successfully developed and utilized automated intraday trading strategies for Forex, I have the following questions:

1. For FXCM, which is better for developing automated intraday trading strategies: Strategy Trader or MT4?

2. Which platform is better at executing such strategies of the above two?

3. In order for you to be able to successfully run an automated FXCM trading system (intraday), what minimum technical specifications, in terms of memory and hard drive space should your computer have?

4. Eventually, I plan to move up to trading index futures contracts and such intraday using Tradestation. How reliable is that platform?

I would tremendously appreciate any experiences you have with the above software programs or any suggestions.

Thanks very much,

Larry
More...


Hi Larry,

I would recommend using the Strategy Trader platform because it has a direct connection to FXCM's servers whereas MT4 connects to FXCM through a software bridge. If you compare speed, Strategy Trader will likely be faster since it takes one less step in the execution process compared to FXCM's MT4.

I think you would also find Strategy Trader more similar to Trade Station in terms of charting features and depth of backtesting features it has available.

-Jason
 
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