Didn’t you ever find job posts for financial markets & trading a bit awkward?

So, as I see, things are a bit like this: there are two categories of jobs.
First category, jobs for traders. These guys are manual , discretionary traders. As opposed to the usual hyped forex trader, these ones work on level II markets for equities and derivatives, with the eyes glued to the orderbook, quick in hand movements and decision making. We might call them Joe Saluzzi’s guys. They need to know how the market psychology reflects in the order book structure and dynamics. This is why these jobs have a very upsetting thing mentioned inside, “knowledge of financial markets is a plus, but not required”. Sounds familiar? Then why the hell did you study this in the first place? Ok, I’ll drop this here, we discussed it in a past article, it’s a “smoked” issue… These guys are slowly being removed from markets, because, unlike the retail traders that have the same traits, they have to work in level II environments, and even worse, in the most cases they work in the same field where the high frequency trading engines roam. And there’s no way for them to compete with the “douchey computers”; the machines are not only faster in terms of execution, but also unethical : they are colocated within exchanges.

Second category, jobs for quants & algo developers. We might call them Irene Aldridge’s followers. Working with complex models that only they understand, they make the algos and program the machines that kill the first category of traders. You can literally find hundreds of job posts for these – but requirements are high , either on the math side , requiring PhDs in physics, math, or statistics, or on the programming side, requiring knowledge in vast computing fields, from low-level networking to extensive math & statistics packages as well as a lot of SQL.

Now…where the hell are we? MetaTrader folks never needed any of these. Statistics were completely unnecessary, because of the low quality of MT4’s Strategy Tester. No need of low-level networking, FIX, SQL. As for complex physics models, the same – no level II , there was no need for them. However, in time, the MetaTrader community grew to an impressive size.

Does it mean that this huge community has no skills? Then why the few MetaTrader jobs are only on freelancing market and include either pesky EA modification projects or things that are outside MQL itself, such as MQL decompiling?

If we think about the finance world, then normal repartition should apply. Which means the majority of funds and trading desks should be somewhere in the middle, using technology of an average quality. Now if the technology is average , it surely can’t be used for complicated high frequency trading games. Then my criteria should apply – it could be used for intermarket approaches, which allow arbing due to latency differences. But, as I said, the technology has an average quality. Sure there is connectivity, prop trading desks around the world have good connectivity – just look at the job posts, they trade quite everything in equities and futures. But, question is, why do they use prop trading, if they have the connectivity? Why not employing more automated trading, if high frequency approaches are not quite possible?

I’m thinking about two possible explanations:
1. The costs of implementing automated desks that use HFT is enormous. Institutional platforms are very costly, even the ones that are used more for informational purposes. They cost shameless amounts of money. Add to this the salaries of quant developers and PhDs and you’re almost going under…
2. The implied paradigm. As I explained in my previous article, the delusion is a result of marketing combined with limits in trading platforms. Now these mid class institutionals may have connectivity, but as we know, average quality institutional platforms have backtesting problems. Not the kinda problems MT4 Strategy Tester has, they have the problem of …lacking it. That is, the producer puts so much emphasis on connectivity and a “white label” API solution, or FIX for more sophisticated desks, that the topic of backtesting gets out of question. Once you put the topic of backtesting out of question, all that remains is people’s gut about the markets. What tricks and scalping techniques they know about the order book, and that’s just about all – that’s the paradigm they have to use on a daily basis.

MetaTrader4 is a plagued platform, and I’m not going to enumerate again all its problems.
Shamefully, MetaQuotes pulled in this whirlwind an entire generation of traders. Ever since MT4 was out, there is this feeling of hopelessness in terms of multiasset backtesting. In a way, it fed the wrong paradigm and own demise, it’s viewed as a junk platform in institutional environments. MT4 may not have been adopted ever by big banks and hedge funds, but small trading desks would have adopted it , if it would have filled the analytics needs and event based programming. And that would have meant decent jobs for retail traders and developers, mark my word! … we wouldn’t have this stigma of Cynderellas of the trading world as we have now.

I expect the final demise on MT4 in retail trading in a few months after the launch of MT5. However, what happens with MT4 is no interest for me, because if it will fail, it will be because its own supporters will desert it for the candies of MT5, not because brokers will impose MT5 before its time.

I am interested in what else might be found in the MT5 pack. If MT5 is the bridge between the retail approach of MT4 and the real institutional platforms , not quite like X-Trader or Strategy Runner, but more like the top notch – Athena, Tango, Orc, FlexTrade , in terms of everything that excludes latency, in both execution and backtesting, then MT5 might mark the beginning of the changes for the retail community. The problem for prop trading desks is simple – adopt a level II platform that allows a lot of automated trading and backtesting in all the areas of trading that hedge funds analyse and operate, except for latency issues; drastically cut trading platform costs – we might even think about custom MetaTrader5 implementation – for their own needs, with their own datafeed. Speed of trading will be higher than whatever the prop traders could have done, analytics and market paradigm improved, all at lower costs than before and way below hedge fund costs!

This could mean finally good and decent jobs for the retail segment. Because the prop desks don’t have the approach that hedge funds have, and they are not forced to stand up the same costs as they do. Their approach is nearer to the retail field, since they don’t use automation. And retail traders that lost years with MT4 are likely to benefit of job openings for MQL5; there will be a transfer of know-how and funds between the retail community and their counterparts in the institutional world. Retail traders can be easily upgraded to more institutional views of the market, because they already have the development skills accumulated in the MT4 times. I couldn’t have thought of a better moment for MT5 to come than in this crysis, when everyone needs to reform : retail segment on the brink of the collapse in US, people losing jobs, hedge funds with a higher pressure from both investors and market. In a time when everyone cuts costs , MT5 appears as the “poor man’s institutional platform”, with features that go beyond mid class institutional platforms. That makes it a good candidate for a lot of the institutional segment, and when this reform happens, the retail segment is right there, awaiting to get jobs…. and be retail no more.

Let’s not forget about the emergence of AlgoDeal as a quantish backtesting platform. Retail quants that lost years on MetaTrader4 might try this one too for sharping up Java skills while viewing MetaTrader5 strategies from another angle. As retail quants skills approach hedge fund requirements this way, amazing changes in careers may happen…

Note: Finance jobs from Romania and other destitute contries of the Eastern Europe don’t fill the profile mentioned in this article. For instance, just compare the financial jobs section of the job sites (or, better said, career sites) like efinancialcareers.co.uk or QuantSpot.com with romanian resume servers like bestjobs.ro or ejobs.ro . Finance here is mostly mixed with accounting and banking, without a clear position and clear subfields in the domain list, denoting not only the lacking hedge funds , prop trading desks and investment banks, but also the ignorance of job site webmasters.

“If I don’t seek to understand what’s happening here then I’ve got peanuts in my head!”
Sheikh Imran N. Hosein

As many of you might guess, it is the documentaries “The Arrivals” and “Phase 3″ that inspired me to write this article. Whether or not the ideas from these documentaries are sustainable or not, there is something, a truly hard core BAD state of how things are, in what pertains markets, and especially retail trading, or what is now widely accepted nowadays as retail trading. From day one that step into retail trading, you feel there is something wrong, but you cannot really grasp it, you are flooded with a lot of information about markets and trading, dubbed by a simultaneous lack of proper tools and trade conditions. You don’t like what you trade, you don’t like how you trade, you don’t understand why what you need can’t be traded, or can’t be backtested, why the leverage may not be proper, why you get slipped, WHY CAN’T YOU DO THINGS BY THE BOOK! And more important why the hell they wrote books about things that are not available?… But nobody answers : it is how things are. You shut up and enter the program. Take what is given. And try… Until you don’t put the questions anymore, and gradually you will see only one thing in trading : FOREX. And one way to do it : indicator-based trade – be it for one pair, or for many forex pairs, in a non-interacting way, similar algorithms, replicated over and over again, in different fashions, but lacking the understanding of every moment existing relations between instruments, especially between instruments that are naturally designed to relate, that are, in many cases, not even available.

Forex has a become quite a mainstream in the trading world nowadays. The most liquid , but also the most unpredictible market of them all, is for years at the fingertips of the retail trader… However, how could it happen that the most dangerous market has become the one that’s easiest to be available? Have no doubt on the dangers of forex : it comes packed with heavy leverage, and the technical analysis, the one that has so much accent on it, comes from old stock market technical analysis, where it is really effective, from the standpoint of nonleveraged trades and daily charts. For years, beginners are sucked into the forex vortex of promises like mosquitos to the light. All kinda half informations , about how to interpret charts, how to interpret news, where to set the take profit and mostly the stop loss, how much the leverage to be like, they are all leading 95% of the herd to fail…

Problem is, this makes overall forex a scam . Sure, there were enough scammers that bought themselves yachts or submarines from the scam of trading against the clients, by betting that they will lose. For some scammers, it turned bad – such as Neuimex, taken over by a trader – but most scammers were fine with their scam. But I’m not talking about this, forex is an overall scam: it is a Hollywood of trading , a “dream machine” attracting more and more traders. Even if brokers are honest, their profits are going up simply from spreads , as the herd mass is growing, especially now, in times of crysis. At least for non-american brokers, because the americans have the NFA on their head and have to face a deteriorating client portfolio because of the no-hedge madness…

Now, things are becoming more and more interesting… Forex is touching mainstream. From a simple trading activity that was advertised by brokers, it has gained social ground. An entire plethora of blogs, magazines, social sites that brand themselves “fx Facebooks” are constantly promoting Forex. You read that well . It’s Forex not trading.
Let’s rechapter forex features:

• uncontrollable leverage – for the very poor trader, even small trades are automatically leveraged (e.g. you have $100, trade 0.01 lots=$1000 , leverage 10);
• technical analysis applicable only on some fx pairs and some timeframes;
• most platforms are non-automated;
• MetaTrader4, the only free automated platform [that matters], is not a server solution ; even more, it has slippage or execution slowness as the broker pleases;
• Lack of events on MetaTrader4 – makes arbitrage detection very slow;
• Manufacturable quotes – aiming to prevent any form of arbitrage. Sure, they trade real, inefficient markets, as we all know that markets are. But you, the retail trader, you trade efficient markets! Cause brokers remove arbitrages. And you know how Harrison – Pliska call the traders in efficient markets? Open your finance book : it’s right there, at financial theory, it says … martingale equivalent operators… and where did you know martingalers are? That’s right, in Casinos! Let them have the safe profit, you take the fear…
• You’re at broker’s mercy – if they don’t like something, they might charge you, cancelling profits;
• Bad institutional view – put forex near your name and you’ll be in retail for life – the institutional career becomes a fading dream – after all, success in forex is about talent – normal people (i.e. institutional traders and quants) think in terms of strategy, arbitrage, execution speed, high frequency trading – you think about indicators…

How did it come to this? The worst market of the world for the retail trader, on all brokerage sites, on all blogs, and now, even on social sites. Emotional value added to madness. Social success dependant on forex? [Curses, the girls will see the those bad trades, but I can't erase them...] Are you guys sane?
How, in the God’s name, could you stand up to this Vegas-view about retail trading, about your money for God sake, a continuous we want our clients to win, not to earn money : “you are not allowed to hedge forex with futures”, “you tried to take advantage of swap”, ” you took advantage of quicker information from an institutional platform” ? Isn’t the forex really a disease of trading, pitched over by marketers to make it look good ?

Is all advantage on the side of the marketers? Is really noone standing on the side of the trader ?

It seems that the birth of MetaTrader5 really disturbed the forex propaganda machine. When a platform that threatens bringing multiasset trading, event-driven trading, including futures and options, at the hand of the retail trader, the propaganda machine had an organic reaction of opposition. It lives by selling, after all, the forex dreams. It doesn’t sell anything useful. I mean, tens of thousands of traders really believe in forex. The machine tells traders lots of stories about forex… It somehow managed to tell them that indicator-based trading beats arbitrage! So, betting and staying with fear, beats profiting with safety. Why? Well, arbitrage means other markets – it means futures, it means options. Why that? Because these are different markets, having different dynamics, and the relationships between them allow a more selective exposure to what is selected as risk and what is selected as opportunityBut wait! These are not cool!. Futures , stocks … these were traded in the 70s, as about options… who trades options? Forex is cool. The hell with arbitrage! Forget arbitrage, bet on the indicator! This is what the forex deceivers tell you, hell, some of them may even believe what they say. Because they know that you are addicted to being cool. “Appearance and reality … they are always different from each other”. Your car is cool, your girlfriend likes you for being cool. So you’re not allowed , you will not even want to trade something that’s not cool. Here, in retail markets, emotion has prevailed over reason, appearance has prevailed over reality… There’s no talk, ever, about the quality of trading. Just forex commercials – like the forex itself is gonna make profits, not trading strategies. And even if the talk moves to strategies, it’s forex enclosed strategies – no other assets. Don’t you wonder why there is no talk of other markets? Like there are NO OTHER MARKETS BESIDES FOREX ? There is no advertising on hedging with futures? Or hedging with options? No talk about the real trading strategies? Used for decades in markets by the masters of the system? The ones that had automation available before you having a computer ? Of course, with the “help” of regulatory bodies. Somebody really had an interest in dumbing down the retail trader, transforming him more into a market gambler rather than a “market businessman”. Cause otherwise how could you have advanced option trading platforms that are not automated? How in the God’s name you have TradeStation, or OptionStation without option automation? (If you don’t believe me, hit www.tradestation.com and find “Automated trading, as it relates to direct-access electronic placement and execution of equity options trades, requires manual one-click verification before order is sent.” on their page). Or look at equities and options stations. Quotes are delayed, by most of them, 15 minutes. This creates a blackout window where you trade on present quotes, by seeing 15 minutes back data. What about automation? Carefully done, don’t let the trader get the data! Look at OptionsXPress XML API. All it needs for trading (in the terms of replacing the front end, but not real automation) but not for getting data. There must be something important about options… Who had the interest to create such legislative mechanisms to stop option automation from being put in practice? And after all, let’s just remind you that MetaTrader is a russian trading platform. It’s not the americans, the ones that made trading and markets popular, the ones to come with free automation in trading. It’s the russians. Isn’t that shameful for the ones that call themselves the inventors of the free market system? Because they always talk so proud about their system of interconnected markets covering equities, futures, options and other derivatives, all the wonders in financial inovation. Ain’t that strange, that the word “system” has a solidity appearance, making you imagine a market system functioning as a whole, while everything that the americans made in markets is shattered into dozens of pieces… Forex trading platforms, with visual quotes to push buttons on ; futures & equities trading platforms , that are not the same as the forex trading platforms, and finally, the last category, option trading platforms, that are mostly looking like combinations between browsers and excel sheets, that have no automation available! There must be something hidden in option trading actually, that they made the retail trader think in terms of browsing and picking, rather than defining analytics procedures and automatically trading. The segmentation makes it hard for true trading systems to be put together not only technically, but also financially, because they need cross-margining (i.e. netting). Again, the appearance of the “market system” , so solid thing, probably only for the big banks (e.g. the ones that bought the bankrupt investment banks), and so shattered in reality for the retail trader… Even small to mid-sized hedge funds encounter problems when it comes to netting. Account openings and arrangements cost money, relationships and take months, then, most are at the hand of prime brokerages that make the arrangements.

Let’s face it, markets were never designed to be retail (and think well about this, it explains why NFA rejects CFDs, so cheap and available for retail trader to take positions in equities and derivatives, why it rejects trading forex in the same account with other classes…) Look on older economics books : banks are always “sophisticated investors”, and the literature had the audacity to call retail people (investors, traders, etc.) as “naive” (implying “stupid”). I think every student or investor that find that he’s called “naive” in a finance book has a rage feeling at the sight of the word! But it’s scientifical so it has to be accepted! But that was just the appearance. The reality was that the retailers were not dumb, rather they were powerless, because the technology was on the side of the masters, as it is case today, with the high frequency trading engines. Something was lost, however, in time. Quantity took place over quality for institutionals, and their trading style shifted from arbitrage across multiple markets (the case of LTCM in the 90s, when the bond arbitrage was abandoned, starts to show the trend, the first big collapse of an alpha hungry mammoth) to a few markets , like equities and institutional forex, where they use the high frequency algos. Somehow the retailers curse touched them: the intermarket arbitrage profits are too small to justify huge trading costs: trading platform costs, exchange colocation fees, PhDs salaries. Thus, they are in a continuous , hungry hunt for alpha, because they have too much liquidity available that has to give good returns, and the only way to do it is by a huge number of small successful trades – and most of the time arbitrage opportunities in terms of liquidity will be too small! A perverse effect that will prove soon helpful for retail traders is the specialization of high frequency algos. I think there is a separate parameter set for every stock , and for every forex pair. I may be wrong, but I am certain that equities and forex are the wolf packs hunting ground. This orientation led to neglecting futures and options, thus creating latency arbitrage windows big enough for retail traders. It is time for an automated, retail, qualitative trading, spanning over multiple asset classes, and MT5 may be the first platform to achieve it for the retail level.

And now, when the propaganda machine is threatened by MT5, that will come with all the things that a normal trading platform is supposed to have, by any normal person that has read about markets the voices are louder and louder against it. I read several viewpoints on MT5. Quite everything that the platform is supposed to have in the future is nothing, has no importance , compared to the dreaded no-hedging issue. As if the ones writing these analyses really know what hedging really is! Analyses focus mostly on station looks, charting, lack of strategy tester, and mostly this hedging issue. People, get finance books and read what hedging really is, before you start attacking MetaQuotes! Trading is, simply, buy low, sell high. Money is being done with arbitrage! And where the arbitrage is not clear, it’s surely a statistical arbitrage. This is what makes money. Be it forex-futures, stock to stock, forex/forex, underlying/options, or even high frequency trading, it’s always a statistical arbitrage. Even the CDSs were theoretically an arbitrage, but with a long bias, of winning more from collected premiums than paying out on defaults – and this was a faulty expection, because was no data to sustain it. Remember – even the LTCM geniuses were thinking that they “arb”, as much as the insurers that had to collapse in 2008… Banks have touched a technological level that’s unparalelled by anything that’s in the retail world, and people attack the only free platform that will at least give good chances in trading, just because it lacks the fake hedging issue. Sure, pseudo-hedgers might say that their trading style is arbitrage-like. But how could it compare to quoting , or volatility arbitrage?

Forex is a big business. But not the forex per se, the forex itself, it’s the commercial forex. And everything that threatens this big dream machine has to be stopped, including MT5! The system is so deceptive that noone has even to push the button to launch an attack on forums and blogs. It’s simple, the lack of education will do it by itself. Deluded traders will unknowingly attack MT5 for stupid reasons, quite the same as their own limited view about trading. So important is to be long and short on the same instrument, everything else does not matter! Like a carriage horse that sees only the road ahead, our fx trader doesn’t see but indicators and contrarian trades! Welcome to Forex, this Awesome Deception of the Trading World – where people don’t trade what has to be traded for profit, but trade what is cool because it’s cool. If you ever traded because it’s cool, you fall in delusion. Sure, forex with all its reality is in the front eyes, but you don’t understand this reality. Forex with its own marketing is not an illusion, because illusion is a perceptive disturbance, rather forex, the way is marketed, is a delusion, a BELIEF DISTURBANCE that manifests thru the marketing of certain ways to trade, dubbed by limits in trading platforms, whether they are in trading capacities, backtesting capacities or both.
WAKE UP!

We at MQLmagazine.com want to be different. We are supporting a more institutional type of trading for the retail trader. This is why we will support only brokers that commit to MetaTrader5 and come with a large symbol offer, including options. We will not forget about american brokers, but since options will be never be traded in the same account as forex, we will look mostly at traditional futures & options brokers that introduce MetaTrader5 for clients looking to have a multiasset type of trading. However, if CTFC manages to get a stronger grip over forex regulation, cutting down the leverage as it intends to (and I say that they cut ridiculessly much down to 10:1) then traders should put pressures over them to lift the restrictions of trading options , equities and futures in other accounts than forex.

This article is dedicated to working with orders, positions and deals.
In this article we will discuss the general principles and passing to the new system. In a new article we will detail the MQL5 programming side on orders, positions and deals.

MetaQuotes changed both the functions but also the principles in working with orders.

A term known in markets is the one of position. The position is the net effect of the trades on a certain asset.

MT4 didn’t knew the concept of position per se. To get the position on an asset, a trader had to write a function, go thru all orders and cummulate the ones on that asset. However, MT4 traders don’t use the position concept, but only the one of trade. Each order placed in the market is a trade itself, with its own result, independent of the others.

MT4 Work example:

1. buy @ 1.3000
2. buy @ 1.3100
3. sell @ 1.3200
4. sell @ 1.3300
5. sell @ 1.3400
6. close [3,4,5] @ 1.3500 : take profit = -300-200-100 = -600
7. close [1,2,3] @ 1.3600 : take profit = +600+500 = 1100

Total profit = 1100 – 600 = 500

MT5 turns somehow to normality, a normality existant in the futures markets, but far away from MT4 trader’s mindset. Forcibly imposed to american brokers by NFA, it became standard for MT5, for who orders don’t matter anymore, but the position. The position is important now, because it tells whether you’re long or short on an asset, and up to which degree. Orders become simple means to alter position.
In other words, a Buy and a Sell don’t have anymore separate destinies, depending on the moments they were launched and closed, but become “position modifiers”. First is opening the position, in this case, and the second, depending on size, shrinks, flattens, or reverses the position.

Same work, MT5 style:
1. buy @ 1.3000 ; position = 1 lot long
2. buy @ 1.3100 ; position = 2 lots long
3. sell @ 1.3200 ; position = 1 lot long, take profit = 1×200 [deal 1] = 200, current open profit = 100 [deal 2]
4. sell @ 1.3300 ; position = flat, take profit = 1×200 [deal 2] = 200
5. sell @ 1.3400 ; pozitie = 1 lot short

6a. Close sell [5] @ 1.3500 ; position = flat, take profit = 1x(-100) = -100

Here’s the difficult part: to emulate MT4’s working style , the trader has to reopen previous orders, which would have been already open in MT4 ; so it has to reconstruct buys:

6b. Relaunch buy 1,buy 2 @ 1.3500 ; position = 2 lots long

7. Close reopened buys @ 1.3600, take profit = 2×100 = 200

Overall profits : 200+200-100+200 = 500

What’s an order in current conditions?

In MT5, the order exists until it’s filled. If we launch a market order, it’s lifetime is a few seconds, until filled. If we launch a pending order, it’s lifetime is undetermined, until it’s fill time. Once filled, the order is depersonalized. Ceases its existence, and alters the position. From that moment, it is called deal . And the word says it all : “it’s a deal” , a closed deal, something of the past – we find it as a historical reference in Account History.

The first conclusion, the one bothering MT4 traders, it’s that hedging vanishes. That form of hedging undestood by them, being long and short on the same instrument. It’s a form of hedging so developed by the MT4 communities that almost elliminated the normal hedging, the one done with other assets – and that thanks to the shortcomings of the MT4’s Strategy Tester that contributed to the misrepresentation, in trading communities, of the elements of financial theory and practice from the institutional area, because these could not have been tested and/or used effectively. From this comes also the resistance to MT5, which tries to bring trading back to normal, by the positional system, but also by events and new asset classes. That trading that’s not indicator betting, but a profit bringing activity – for this is why you are in trading, otherwise you’d hit for the casino. This is the purpose of MQLmagazine, to reeducate traders, to bring back to surface what has been lost from financial education in past years, all the good things and lost in time by retail communities, but which are being used at the institutional level. Of course not all what’s done at the institutional level is necessarily useful or applicable, but a normal trading, that includes quotation, arbitrage and options, can be activated in the retail zone.

The non-simultaneity of the operations – this is what bothers the traders now.
As you can see in my example, the total profit is the same. But in MT4 traders could have closed the orders, being simultaneously present , at different prices. This is the missing link, the opportunity loss accused at MT5. Because for MT5 orders are simple position modifications. Resulting is that position is like a permanent order, adjusted permanently – so the moments, the manner and the degree of adjustments matter now.

In a way traders feel a more sharply the indicators pressure, the need to be right more offen and make lesser mistakes. And this is truly the case, at least from the point of view of monoasset trading. It seems that retail trading will be multiasset or won’t be anymore at all. The multiasset signals are far more fruitful than the monoasset signals – you can use Bollinger bands to see more correctly the breaks in correlations, or you can trade the volatility of the underlying asset using options without knowing the direction.

I’m convinced that after the definitive launch of MT5 this will be adopted by many traders for its advantages offered in multiasst trading are outbalancing the disadvantages that it has in monoasset trading. After all, it’s an educational matter: as the traders have been educated to work with MT4 indicators and have a certain vision over markets, the same way they can expand their vision to cover MT5. And I’m certain that barely now there will appear stable elements helpful for building automated trading systems.

This was the title of my last post in my former blog on the vamist.ro website – the romanian forex community. At that time I was announcing my decision to move my blog on a brand new domain – my own. However, things changed and there had come the decision to write a magazine. But what kind of magazine ? Well, there are plenty magazines for traders. Take a look at the ones better known – CurrencyTrader , Futures & Options Trader… They target most of the time the strategical type of trader. The one that takes long term trades that span on months. This is why most of their analysis are floating around market forecasts. Of course, around these, different platform commercials and explanations of “forex” terms.

The retail forex market is around for some good years. In the so-called “western world”, these markets became known and called for retail traders right from beginning. But here, in Romania, where the authors are located, forex is still not too much known. However, we will not make a forex magazine. As I said, forex was what was offered to beginners at that time. Things have started to change a bit a few years ago, when forward steps have been made by several brokerages, that started to offer futures and equities under MetaQuotes’ most acclaimed platform, MT4. But it wasn’t the time of a revolution in retail trading. Because MT4 was not designed – although it is the best retail trading platform – to trade the manner professional traders think and do it. Therefore, several trading strategies that were known to professional traders and , in general, to the hedge fund world, have remain hidden from the sight of retail traders. Even more, brokerages commercials and forums accentuated the traders indoctrination that forex was the ultimate market that could have been traded. Lots of trading strategies and markets were hidden : pair trading strategies, quoting, forex arbitrage (although it was tackled at that time by a few, including myself) , forex / futures arbitrage, commodities arbitrage, and finally option strategies. Option strategies still are, at this time, the realm of derivatives quants. Even professional option traders don’t trade the way they might think – because either the platforms can’t do it and the NFA regulations restrict it. Here are some facts about trading platforms and regulations:

- most of them do not have a backtesting module;

- most of them do not support even exchange traded options, not speaking about exotics;

- most of them do not offer automation for options, and that including the well-known TradeStation and OptionStation;

- option stations may not support any other assets – example RAN Order and IKON.

- the ones that have a backtesting module may not backtest multiple assets;

- data feed is dependant on either broker or data provider; so you may have, or not, what you desire to trade;

- they might offer their own scripting language or API ; professional platforms might offer only FIX specification and leave automation on the hands of extremely skilled C++ programmers;

- under NFA regulations you cannot trade in a forex account anything else besides forex, gold and silver. Anything else, including forex options or real futures, trade in a separate account;

- under NFA regulations you cannot trade CFDs (broker manufactured assets that mimic real market, being tailored to small investors);

- under NFA regulations you can trade futures, equities, and options in the same account;

- and finally, under NFA regulations, you cannot hedge – that is, you cannot be long and short at the same time on an instrument ; even more, positions open and close in a FIFO manner.

Unfortunately, MT4 didn’t score too much either ; a limited platform, extremely latent , which can’t backtest anything but strategies trading one asset and with no implementation of options. As a result, anything quite constructive that could have been built in theoretical conditions (i.e. textbook strategies) could not be backtested or not even implemented at all.

But with the emergence of the new MetaQuotes’ flagship platform, MT5, things have started to change. At the time this article is being written, MT5 is in open beta. The “Strategy Tester” module (which is well known by some of our readers and will be also presented in future articles) is not present in the platform. It is our belief that the Strategy Tester will allow development of multiasset strategies. Multiasset backtesting is needed in a lot of situations. I might even say that all successful trading is multiasset trading. You might ask why. And the answer is simple. All [successful] trading is a form of arbitrage. Some will argue and say that very good trading systems don’t arbitrage – but when you look at a sheet with trades and see a good percentage of profitable trades that are not offset by bad trades, somehow the system knew to buy something cheap and sell something expensive, so it does nothing else than a price-value arbitrage. But one-asset markets are just too random for the unexperienced trader to handle. After all, what is of value is the multiasset approach, because markets can’t be too efficient overall. Correlations are broken, parity relations are broken, add to this the magic of options, and look at the big picture : markets become full of opportunities! Now don’t ask why they got into the crysis : they had too much money, way too much money in order to make enough using opportunities.  After all, we’re not interested in universal strategies that apply to everyone. But in strategies that apply to US, THE SMALL GUYS.

So, given that the new MT5 comes with new features, like multiasset backtester, option trading and event-based programming, we decided it was time for a magazine for all things MetaTrader. Of course, with the accent on MQL programming.  The magazine will be addressed to all categories of MetaTrader users: absolute beginners that never heard of trading and are making the first steps in the world of markets, MetaTrader traders that use the terminal , and finally all categories of MQL programmers – task specific programming and also complex strategies design and programming.

Stay tuned for our next articles.