Zulutrade Adds MetaTrader4 Support

Somewhat belatedly at the end of June zulutrade.com introduced a feature every industry-standard service should have — support for system development and automated trading platform. Collective2 has support for several such platforms, including TradeStation and MetaTrader. Zulutrade choosed MetaTrader.

To have support for such development/trading platform is a must. By far most system developers use such platforms rather than proprietary code in java, c++ or whatver. Some of the trading algorithms are best traded in fully automated mode as there is no value to be added by manually entering the trades.

MetaTrader4 (MT4) is a good choice. It seems the most popular choice for up-and-coming forex system developers. The platform and qoutes are available free of charge through a variety of brokers by opening free demo accounts. The system code in MT4 is written in a proprietaryMQL4 language (similar to C programming language).

In my opinion, Tradestation is a superior product to MT4. EasyLanguage is easier to master and it leaves more “brain power” to focus on the logic of the trading algorithm itself rather than on how to express it in fairly technical MQL4 (or C) programming language. MQL4 comes hardly with adequate support documentation and leaves a lot to guesswork for those who want to master it. But then, MT4 is a decent competitor to TradeStation, a totally new version — MT5 — is to be available soon and it’s free. Tradestation costs $250 monthly for non-brokerage customers. Generally, the trading system developers have voted and zulutrade.com seems to have made the right choice.

P.S. As a sidenote, Tradestation seems to miss the point by ignoring freemium economy of the internet. It’s their business and they have all the right to run as they want it, but it looks to me that their current marketing strategy is plain inefficient. Small guys, particularly the bright ones, would rather master java, C, C# or MQL4 rather than pay $250/mo for the platform. Big guys hire programmers and don’t need the platform. It leaves them with rather small market segment.

Advertisements