AskPips.com

JasonRogers

FXCM Strategy Trader can be compared against MT4 in terms of charting and automated trading.

CHARTING

From a charting perspective, Strategy Trader has many features that MT4 (and even MT5) lacks, such as:

1. Tick Charts: MT4 has a very basic tick chart in the Market Watch window but you can't add indicators or load historical information into the chart window. Neither can you execute strategies off the tick chart if you want to.
2. Customizable chart timeframes: In MT4, you're limited to the chart time frames built into the platform. With Strategy Trader, you can customize the chart by tick, points, seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, month quarter or year. For example, if you want to view a 10 tick bar chart, you can. If you want to view a 379 minute candle chart, you can, and so forth.
3. Strategy Trader has hard to find chart options such as Renko, Point & Figure, Line Break, and Kagi which MT4 does not have.
4. Strategy Trader has over 100 built in indicators whereas MT4 has about 25.

AUTOMATED TRADING

1. MT4 uses MQL programming language for strategy coding which is proprietary to MetaQuotes whereas Strategy Trader uses C# programming language for strategy coding which is open source. At the moment, you will probably find more information for MT4 indicators and strategies since traders have been using the platform for a longer period of time.
2. MT4 updates price data each second whereas Strategy Trader updates price data tick by tick. There can be multiple ticks per second so there will be more price data on Strategy Trader.
3. MT4 can pull about 15,500 data points from the server for backtesting, whereas Strategy Trader can pull about 500,000 data points from the server for backtesting.

about 1 year ago

Source(s):

• http://www.fxcm.co.uk/automated-forex-trading.jsp
• http://www.fxcm.co.uk/automated-forex-trading.jsp