FXCM Active Trader and Raw Data

I am very interested in auto trading with an FXCM Active Trader account utilising Raw Data. This is the sum of my research to date:

To use Active Trader requires an account of $50,000 + or a trade volume of $10 million/month nominal.

Active Trader offers commissions within the spread or separate from the spread. Here's a short video that explains the FXCM benefits of commission outside of the spread.

http://forexforums.dailyfx.com/active-t ... icing.html

With commissions separated from the spread Active Trader offers the tightest spreads outside of the big banks (please let me know if there are others) and definitely from any other retail broker. A colleague of mine has seen EURUSD as narrow as 2/10 of a pip. Tight spreads keep stop orders from being hit unnecessarily and could help single data set backtests be more indicative of future results in the bid/ask world. FXCM provide this tight spread data. They call it Raw Data.

FXCM offers Raw Data in two modes. For a single $600 you can purchase a data downloader facility that will provide tick and minute data going back to 2001 for all the pairs they offer to trade. MC can use this in ASCII format but only in historical mode. The data download is excruciatingly slow. Think hours for a single pair bid or ask minute file.

At present to use Raw Data in real time requires using the software FXCM give away with every account called Strategy Trader (white label MC with some modifications). Now here's the rub. Strategy Trader does not support EasyLanguage. It requires you to program in C++.

MC offer a service to translate an EasyLanguage compiled signal to a Strategy Trader compiled Advisor for a fee. You will need to share the code with MC for this translation and MC have an NDA (Non Disclosure Agreement) available to protect all parties. This is a fab solution but does require that one has the finished article before translation. If you need to add functionality it would be back to MC...

If anyone has been down this route I'd love to hear from you.

I'd also be very interested in a solution that allowed me to use my MC EasyLanguage code for both systems or for MC to connect directly with the Raw Data feed and Active Trader service.

Hope this helps,

Anthony

Here's a solution to connect FXCM Raw Data to MultiCharts

Use this link:

http://forexforums.dailyfx.com/free-app ... godde.html

to:

Download the FXCM OrderToGo runtime.

Download FXCM OrderToGoDDE application.

Watch MC tutorial on creating a chart from DDE data source:

https://www.multicharts.com/multicharts/help/videos/

If you do not want to instal, or have no access to, Excel the settings for the Data Sources panel are:

Trade:
Price: =O2GDDE|BID!'*'
Volume: leave blank

Bid:
Price: =O2GDDE|BID!'*'
Volume: leave blank

Ask:
Price: =O2GDDE|ASK!'*'
Volume: leave blank

When creating symbols check that the resolution of the price scale is correct. For example:

EURJPY: 1/1000

USDJPY: 1/1000

GBPUSD: 1/100000

EURUSD: 1/100000