How to trade Forex with InteractiveBrokers

Questions about MultiCharts .NET and user contributed studies.
argos_888
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How to trade Forex with InteractiveBrokers

Postby argos_888 » 15 Aug 2013

Hi,
I'm trying to trade Forex with InteractiveBrokers. I have latest versions of TWS and MC.NET. I'm using one of MC signals to open a trade. I set the contract size to 30000 so it goes through the IDEALPRO exchange. Let's say it opens a short trade for USDJPY (sell USDJPY) and after some time that position has a profit. I close the trade manually from the trading panel (the one that is on the right side of the chart). After the trade has been closed the profit appears on my account as JPY CASH. It's not what I expect. I expect everything to be converted back into USD which is my account currency. Does anyone know what to do with this? Are there any settings to change or should I report it as a bug?

MidKnight
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Re: How to trade Forex with InteractiveBrokers

Postby MidKnight » 16 Aug 2013

Welcome to IB, that is how it works with their accounts. It's been complained about for many years on many forums but IB don't care. The same thing would happen if you trading Hang Seng futures in which case your pnl would show up as HKD in your account.

In all these cases it is up to you to manually convert to your base currency at your discretion. I tend to zero out my non-base currencies once a month when I'm wiring out my income.

Don't worry about these currencies affecting your total balance because they are not in your base currency. The platform will apply currency conversions to present a virtual base account value.

For a FX trader, I think using IB is a bit of a hassle and certainly non-standard compared to other FX platforms and how the others display your account information. I still use IB as my main account, but its more tedious for the user than it needs to be.....

IF MC.net would connect to my Oanda account then I'd just use Oanda as my main for all FX trades. Maybe MC.net team will notice my comment ;)

With kind regards,
MK

Fabrice
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Re: How to trade Forex with InteractiveBrokers

Postby Fabrice » 16 Aug 2013

With discretionary trading, ButtonTrader makes FX trading with IB very easy. The only reason I do not use it is because ButtonTrader requires to have the master ID (ID 0). So other TWS clients are not aware in real-time of opened positions, which therefore are not displayed on MC charts. As just only 1 missing trade, or just 1 missing entry or 1 missing exit is enough to corrupt *ALL* the Manual Trading Performance Report (MTPR), I have decided to use only MC.

Regards.

PS: By the way it is a shame that MTPR is so closed to any manual tweaking, because MC is unable to detect and include missing trades by looking the TWS trades log. This tends to make MTPR almost useless, because one day or another, for any reason (such as trading with TWS while MC is off), it *WILL* miss an entry or an exit, or both. Then all your data, patiently accumulated in the MTPR database, weeks after weeks, become useless in a flash.... Something should be really done here.


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