Thread: Clarification on status of FXCM Strategy Trader

Hi,

I would like clarification on the status of FXCM Strategy Trader.

I saw here (Strategy trader loses functionality after several days trading), that FXCM is not supporting Strategy Trader any more.

Is this really true?

What does it mean?

Will the "plug be pulled" on this - meaning it is not possible to trade any more, or just that there will be no support / no updates, etc.?

Myself, and many others have spent a long time learning this platform, and developing code, indicators and strategies, and the prospect of having to throw this away and start again is not one that I relish.

Cheers,

Robocod.

That's a worry, I'd love to hear the answer to Robocods questions too!!

I've been told the following by FXCM

"Strategy Trader and Order2Go have been deprecated for about 6 months now and will be kept running for the time being. Eventually, though, probably by the end of the year, it will be stopped. Even if it does stay running, as other peripherals get updated, the platform would fall behind and not work properly and be unsupported. "

All your work may not be lost. I looked at the Ninjatrader website they run a good charting package using Fxorder2go and a C# variant for strategies. I emailed them and found out they are currently beta testing a connection with FXCM [using them as broker and data feed]. They couldn't give me a time frame as to when the testing will finish.

So that could be the way to go for existing ST customers

Hi,

I would like clarification on the status of FXCM Strategy Trader.

I saw here, that FXCM is not supporting Strategy Trader any more.

Is this really true?

What does it mean?

Will the "plug be pulled" on this - meaning it is not possible to trade any more, or just that there will be no support / no updates, etc.?

Myself, and many others have spent a long time learning this platform, and developing code, indicators and strategies, and the prospect of having to throw this away and start again is not one that I relish.

Cheers,

Robocod.

Hi Robo,

We met a couple weeks ago on one of your threads. I spoke to someone at FXCM and asked their opinion of which platform he would recommend and he recommended MT4. In order as far as platforms for creating custom indicators and "EA's" he recommended in the following order:

MT4
Trading Station II
Strategy Trader

We both agreed ST was the best as far as features and potential, but also agreed that support and documentation is poor at best and very disorganized. Based on that I decided to learn MQL4 instead of investing my time in a platform that's future is questionable IMO. It's a shame because ST really is heads and shoulders above MT4 as far as a platform goes.

The person at FXCM did say that FXCM will continue to support ST, but it will be limited and there are no plans for updates.

I know that is probably not what you wanted to hear, but I hope that helps.

Joe

Originally Posted by bustard

I've been told the following by FXCM

"Strategy Trader and Order2Go have been deprecated for about 6 months now and will be kept running for the time being. Eventually, though, probably by the end of the year, it will be stopped. Even if it does stay running, as other peripherals get updated, the platform would fall behind and not work properly and be unsupported. "

All your work may not be lost. I looked at the Ninjatrader website they run a good charting package using Fxorder2go and a C# variant for strategies. I emailed them and found out they are currently beta testing a connection with FXCM [using them as broker and data feed]. They couldn't give me a time frame as to when the testing will finish.

So that could be the way to go for existing ST customers

Strategy Trader is based on multicharts (Trading Software for Automated Trading and Backtesting | MultiCharts Trading Platform) so thats what I'm going to use when/if they kill off strategy trader. Multicharts has the same charting capabilities and the same optimiser as strategy trader but uses a different language (easylanguage or power language). I've not yet delved into these but I expect the learning curve will be easier than moving to an entirely new platform like ninjatrader which although uses C#, its EA's are constructed in a totally different way. Also, multicharts is already capable of connecting with fxcm.

There are still some questions I have about multicharts such as how it handles subcharts which is still buggy in strategy trader, can it access multiple accounts like strategy trader and does it support hedging which is an annoying limitation of strategy trader.

As for MT4, as far as I can see, its designed to help people lose their money. Restricting the chart options to a handfull of time based chart options is useless.

Hopefully ST will soldier on for a while yet!

I do hope that FXCM will continue to allow the current version of ST to be used for us.

After a long learning curve, I have my multi-time frame strat running completely stable, using some worka-rounds here and there.

As I see it, this platform does have some issues, but once you figure it out, it appears to me by far superior over competing platforms.

I was also under the impression that Order2Go was supposed to have support for a couple of years still, which would mean that also ST will have a couple of years of support as well.

I reckon that the lack of documentation is a hurdle for users who do not have a programming background of one or another flavour.

The work of robocod demonstrates, however, that this platform has great potential even as a user-friendly tool, once you have a set-up of re-usable code base.

I hope that FXCM recognises the potential of this platform, may it be right now that the user base is still somewhat small, but it is a far better platform and programming model than MT4.

Cheers,
Martin

Hi,

Thank you for all the support on ST. As we mentioned before, there will be no updates on ST. However, for those who continue to use ST, we do provide support for them.

Regards,
jpschan

Hello

What come after Strategytrader ?
I and other users have many of C# codes for StrategyTrader. Is this code developing in vain ?


b.r. GTradeFX

Originally Posted by GTradeFX

Hello

What come after Strategytrader ?

The official options are MT4 or MarketScope / TSII in that order. I have performed a fairly thorough analysis of moving from ST to MT4 and concluded that, while I could basically do everything I wanted to be able to do, including extend MT4's capabilities beyond the as-is package to allow a strategy to eg access a database, and test with large amounts of history data, two limitations make MT4 not a contender as a platform for a serious automated trader.

First, the daily chart is not sychronised with FXCM's price feed. Daily bars run, as far as FXCM is concerned (and almost everyone else too) from 5pm NY time to 5pm NY time. So you get 5 daily bars a week starting at 5pm Sunday NY time and ending 5pm Friday NY time. However, MT4 bars start and end at midnight GMT. Now Sunday 5pm NY time is 9pm GMT Sunday in the summer and 10pm GMT in winter (by definition, GMT does not observe daylight saving time). The result is you get an extra bar on the daily charts, starting at 9pm GMT or 10pm GMT depending on the time of year, and finishing at midnight GMT Monday (by which time it's 8pm or 7pm in NY) when Monday's bar starts. This completely messes up fixed period indicators, which suddenly see an extra closing price every week that shouldn't be there. Also, the indicators will be working off different closing prices every other day of the week because the bars open and close in different places. The result is you can't reproduce other platforms' indicator signals on MT4, even if you have perfectly mimicked the code. Your indicators will give you different signals, and your strategies will trade in different places...

It basically renders the daily time frame unusable in my opinion.

Fair enough, I said to myself, let's see what the shorter term time frames are like. After all if necessary one can always simulate the daily bars from shorter term charts.

But there's an even more venomous snake in the grass on the intra-day time frames -- fixed spreads in backtesting. MT4 doesn't store Ask price history, only Bid price. It gets an Ask price during a backtest by applying a fixed spread to the Bid price from history. It uses as the fixed spread the current spread at the moment the backtest is started. Thus there is no modelling of how spread expands and contracts during the day. For intra-day strategies, this is very important. Not only that but it means that while the market is open, you can run exactly the same backtest at different times of day and get wildly different results. Which makes it darn difficult to test the effect of strategy code changes... And, if you try testing on the weekend, good luck if your pair's spread widened artificially going into the close as they so often do on a Friday. Good luck backtesting EURUSD 15 min strat with a 12 pip spread...

It's possible to work around the ridiculous-weekend-spread issue but the workaround is seriously FIDDLY. And, it's STILL a fixed spread which is still useless for intra-day trading modelling.

So, we have established you can't effectively backtest intra-day strategies in MT4 and you can't use the daily charts effectively either. So, you are left with the Weekly and Monthly charts -- how many of us use those as our primary trade-decision charts?

I am currently learning LUA and plan to perform a similar analysis of MarketScope. Right in that process now so will post as I come to a conclusion.

A couple of people have mentioned Multicharts which does look suspiciously like StrategyTrader. Here was me thinking FXCM had actually designed ST... it seems not. Makes it a little easier to understand why FXCM is willing to trash ST -- they are not abandoning as much work, and hence time and money, as we who have developed strategies for it are, at least relatively speaking. People who really want to stay with ST (and that might turn out to be me if MarketScope has serious deficiencies like MT4) should look at Multicharts -- but warning, it costs money, and not a little of it either...

Just wanted to put this out there to help people coming to this thread wondering if there is life after ST...

Mark

Well this really blows as I have been learning the in and outs of c# programming for the past year just for strategy trader...I am looking into
mql5.. does anybody know anything about it....As far as I can tell strategy trader is more powerful with the advantages of c# programming...
way to go fxcm....I really liked strat trader .....REALLY BUMMED OUT!!!

If strategy Trader is a spin-off from MultiChart. We might just move to use MultiChart instead?

I read from MultiChart, they are also a partner of FXCM and will allow us to use MultiChart free if we have trading volume of 80 x 10k lot a month.

Ninja trader seems to be a good platform, and also supporting c#. I want to test out both platform first. Does anyone tried ninja trader. Would really love to hear about that.

Can you give a link to the information regarding the free use of Multicharts for trading volumes > 80 x 10K.
I can't see it.

here's the link http://www.multicharts.com/free-forex-charts/.

I have emailed multichart about this offer.
There is a **Catch**.

this multichart platform they offer for free is not the latest version of MultiChart PRO, or the MultiChart .NET version.. MCFX is an older generation, and I believe that's why they are willing to let us use it for free.


Multichart .NET or the PRO version is kind of expensive. Even thought we can reuse our ST code, there is a upfront cost of buying it. like $950. And you will have to pay $90 for the data feed every month !!
(Trading volume of x80 10k lot can waive this data feed only) so paying $950 is inevitable...

kind of sad.