I downloaded Strategy Trader out of curiosity. At first look, the product was so inspiring... But, the very first attempt to use it left me so bemused.
What doesnât FXCM tell us?
At first, the advertising tables look so great. More than 100 indicators. Wow! 4 strategies. Wow-Wow! But... Stop, guys. I will not trade using the tables. I need the tool for trading. What do I need then? I need freedom of choosing the trading tools. Here is what I have in fact:
Custom indicators I can download: MT4: thousands. Strategy Trader: 0.0
Custom strategies I can download: MT4: thousands. Strategy Trader: 0.0
But even the indicators "included"... 4 moving averages while just one MT4âs moving average indicator does much more! So, I personally prefer 25 indicators which work right and a chance to load the indicator I really need.
Can't download? Well, Iâm ready to develop. C#? Huh! Sounds good as well. Popular! Well known! The next thing I tried to do was to write an indicator. Iâm not a C# guru and, moreover, Iâm not a professional programmer, but I wrote the indicators and advisors for MT4, so, I expected I would be able to do the same for Strategy Trader.
The first thing is the documentation. Probably, MT4âs documentation is not the best documentation in the world (Russian guys have never been pretty good at it), but, you know, the documentation is like sex â even bad is much better than nothing. Tell you that, guys, Strategy Trader âdocumentationâ is just a list of some âclassesâ with no information on how I should use it.
Hopefully, FXCM is so generous to provide the sources of all existing indicators. I used the simplest indicator to try. Show arrows when EMA crosses Bollinger Bands. It takes only a half screen of lines in MT4. After a day of work, it turned into three screens in Strategy Trader and the best thing I got was 160-characters-long construction with mainly names and points but with no comparisons, which should be used to check whether the indicators cross. Wow! Wow! Wow! I felt like a programming guru. Was it the purpose?! Now I know that the only reason which could seduce me for such experience again is whether FXCM pays me for it and whether it pays me well. Nothing like easy-to-read and easy-to-write good old MT4âs code.
And the last but not the least. My PC isnât the worst in this world, but Strategy Trader is so slow. Try to open 80-bars chart? It takes up to a minute! (BTW, on my 15Mbs broadband MT4 loads more data in no time!). At the same time, the CPU usage was never lower than 5% on my quad-core, with only 5 charts open. It was during the last Friday when the market was relatively still. What kind of equipment should I have to use Strategy Trader when the market really starts moving?!
I felt as though Iâve been fooled like a child who opened a glaring candy cover and found a piece of... You know.
So, I hope that FXCM will not stop supporting MT4 and will not leave us all without a chance for the real strategy trading.
