In a similar style to Mark’s Thinking Stuff Forex trading software where the user is given a NON-programming approach to automating their strategy this web site similarly provides the ability for the user to test a myriad of trading strategies and to then trade those strategies LIVE via your FXCM account.

What made this web site even more compelling was the fact that all this (so far) is offered FREELY!!

Basically here’s how it works:
1. First you start at the SIGNAL end by compiling your entry and exit signals on selected time frames (you’re unfortunately only limited to the signals offered). If you’ve created some exit signals be sure to create a “Contextual Exit” otherwise your exit signals will not be used when you formulate your system.
2. When you’re happy that you’ve got your signals listed, jump over to SYSTEMS and select which currency pair you’d like to test your singals on, which direction (either Long or Short), what the order type should be once your entry signals are satisfied, and at what times you would want your system to run on (i.e. ALL, or just during the London session, or NY session… etc). Lastly, select your exit strategy.
3. Then move over to TESTS and create a new test. Select the strategy you want to test and the date range of your backtest and hit start.
4. Wait a few minutes and you’ll soon have your results sent to your email address.

Easy, huh?

Okay, so what are the downsides of this service?

Well, I think one issue that some people might have is that your systems are public. I suppose this is a negative and a positive, because on the one hand you can look at other people’s systems and tweak them to suit your own trading personality, yet on the other hand YOUR edge may begin to lose its profitability if others start using it.

Another problem is that you’re only limited to 100 signals, systems and tests per account. This may not sound like much, but considering that you can only test one currency in one direction at a time 8 tests can be chewed up quite easily on one system if the user tests both LONG and SHORT on each of the four majors.

Lastly, I’d prefer if I could access the test results better – maybe an export to CSV file or something of that nature. Ideally I’d like to see something whereby we have a table that has at least the following: ENTRY DATE & TIME, ENTRY PRICE, INITIAL STOP LOSS (IF ANY), EXIT DATE & TIME, EXIT PRICE, MAE, MFE, P/L (IN PIPS).

Anyway, HiveTrader is definitely worth a look and I would encourage you to go over and have a little play.

(If you like you can include my username currsec in the referrer ID when you register your account – I don’t make anything by you doing so.)

Tags: Auto Execution, FXEngines, Forex Systems, Forex Tester, HiveTrader

Just as I had finished coding up the CancelOrder procedure had I soon discovered that Wealth-Lab does not offer the functionality of flushing its alerts window.

What’s so important about that? I hear you ask.

You know how we created the alerts so that it would accurately showed us how much of a particular order was attributed to closing an already existing position and how much of the other portion was to initiate a new position… well, it seems that if we ever wanted to cancel an order that was split like this the side that was not cancelled would still be shown as active. Allow me to illustrate this by way of an example:

Let’s say we have already bought 5 GBPUSD contracts (therefore we are LONG 5 GBPUSD) and these 5 contracts do not have an attached stop loss order. Now let’s assume that we place an order to SELL 9 GBPUSD contracts. If we open Wealth-Lab and login to our CMS demo brokerage account our alerts screen will show something like this:

Sell 5 GBPUSD
Short 4 GBPUSD

Which is correct.

However, it we click on the cancel button for any one of these two orders the ENTIRE order will be cancelled, even though the alerts window will show one as being active!

eg. If we were to cancel the first order…

Cancelled 5 GBPUSD
Short 4 GBPUSD

Are there any workarounds?

At the moment this is what I’m trying to figure out, BUT if we think about this carefully do we really want “workarouds”? I mean, I don’t know about you, but I’d prefer to have NO workarounds at all if I want to eventually put real money on the line.

However, if we are to integrate this into Wealth-Lab we would need to change the alerts window so that each line reflects one order, continuing with our example above our order to sell 9 GBPUSD’s would look like this in the alert window:

Short 9 GBPUSD

Again though I think this is where things will begin to get messy as we simply cannot refesh the alerts window in Wealth-Lab and as Wealth-Lab needs to be linked to a portfolio if we start amassing too many entry orders (even though they may not be entry orders at all in CMS) it will begin to bog down the entire process.

Could this be the end of the road?

Possibly, and if it is it was still a worthwhile experience.

Tags: Auto Execution, Forex Trading

If you conducted some testing you would have noticed that if you placed multiple orders that tallied greater than its open position quantity you would have seen an output that would have been wrong.

As an example, if you were long 1 mini USDJPY position (with NO attached stop loss orders) and placed 3 individual 1 mini stop sell orders on the USDJPY you would have seen on the alerts something to the effect of:

Sell 1 USDJPY
Short 2 USDJPY

This is incorrect as we need to return each individual order, such as:

Sell 1 USDJPY
Short 1 USDJPY
Short 1 USDJPY

With this new code it seems to have solved this problem.

If you’ve been following and have used the previous code download the latest one here. If you’ve used the code in the part 3 article after this date then you don’t need to worry you would have downloaded the correct version.

Tags: Auto Execution, Forex Trading

Over the last couple of days I’ve been racking my brain over how best to have WLD read open orders.

Think about this for a second:

If I am long 3 mini lots on the EURUSD, and I place a stop and reverse order to sell 6 minis on the EURUSD how should this order register on WLD?

Now before you contemplate an answer remember than CMS and WLD have two different order types. CMS has only buy and sell, Wealth-Lab on the other hand has Buy, Sell, Cover and Short – therefore our alerts are going to need to be a little more precise.

In answer to my question above though, in Wealth-Lab we will need to show 3 lots as being of the order type “Sell” and 3 lots as being of the type “Short” – as the first lot will see the closing out of an already existing position, whereas the next lot will be the opening of a new short position.

Okay, several other things I noticed about CMS’s order types is that they signal whether a position is attached to an already open position. In other words, if you attach a stop or limit order to a trade these stop and limit orders will be different to a limit or stop order that isn’t attached to another order.

CMS do this by simply denoting attached orders as “L” (limit) or “S” (stop) and unattached orders as “EL” (entry limit) or “ES” (entry stop).

This does help as we now know that every order that is denoted by an L or an S is one that is attached to an already existing position, therefore, it can only be a “Sell” order type or a “Cover” order type.

While this seems so much easier in print it ended up being quite a pain trying to get it down into code for orders that are unattached as we still needed to find out whether there were any orders that were open and didn’t have attached orders.

Anyway, here is the new code that you should paste over your existing VC# CMSAPI project.

Don’t forget to change the username and password fields in the script to your demo account’s username and password.

Hit F6 (or Build > Build Solution) and before you open up Wealth-Lab open up your VT platform and login to your demo account and place a few trades (otherwise nothing will register in your alerts screen in WLD).

Enter into a currency at market and then place a stop order for a lesser, or more quantity than the amount you just went at market with.

Try this for other currencies before opening up Wealth-Lab, maybe even place a few stop and limit entry orders with attached stops/limits.

Write down what Wealth-Lab will need to show – don’t forget that WLD uses Buy, Sell, Short and Cover so you may really need to nut out what will happen if you’ve put some complex orders on.

You should notice that when you open WLD and login to your broker that the orders display as your answers should.

You may also notice that attached stop and limit orders to entry stop and limit orders aren’t shown. There’s a good reason for this: these orders aren’t active – they’re an If-Done type of order, meaning that they will only become active if the entry stop or limit order turns into an open position.

Tags: Auto Execution, Forex Trading

What I’d like to do is to just explain myself a little further on why I am undertaking this journey as well as provide some disclaimers to those who are following along.

Firstly, I undertook this task as an adventure.

I have used Wealth Lab Developer for several years and have used the product fairly extensively during those three years. As I feel I know the Wealth Lab platform quite well I thought I could undertake the task of creating a forex broker API to see if I could auto-trade – as this functionality exists (I suppose my attitude is similar to British climber George Mallory’s when he climbed Mount Everest in 1924, when asked why he did it, he responded with, “Because it’s there”) .

So, just as George did, I too am embarking on my own Mount Everest: auto-trading the forex market through WLD… because it’s there.

While I don’t doubt that other platforms, such as MetaTrader, can provide auto-trading functionality I thought I’d rather spend my time learning VB.NET (or VC#) which can help broaden my programming horizons that may possibility add further functionality to WLD or to other things in general.

Which leads into my disclaimer.

I haven’t coded any VB.NET (or VC#) stuff EVER, therefore, if we ever do get to the end of this adventure you should check the code THOROUGHLY before even contemplating using it on a real account.

I know for myself personally that I’ll be stringently testing any system I wish auto-traded for at LEAST 1 month on a demo account before moving it to a real account, and even then I would still be a little skeptical on the process.

So please understand this “adventure” could just be that – an adventure. However I do want to know if I can do this, and what problems or benefits such an adventure can bring to my forex trading skills.

All in all I hope we all learn something through the experience.

I wish everyone the best with their forex trading success.

Tags: Auto Execution, Forex Trading

Now that we have a successfully created a link between our dll file and WLD we now need to similarly create a link between our dll file and CMS’s VT platform.

In this short lesson we will simply connect to our VT DEMO platform and return the account balance and usable margin.

Here’s what we do…

With VC# 2005 Express Edition open and our VC# CMSAPI code open we need to firstly add another COM reference, being VT’s.

We do this by clicking on Project > Add Reference > COM > select VTAPI Library 1.0 > click OK.

We then implement VTAPI’s events into the new code which will make it look like this.

Alright, our idea is to now write some code that will do the following:

1. It will login us in to the VT platform – if it is unsuccessful it should tell us;

2. Return our account balance and usable margin once it is successfully logged in.

Easy.

The procedure we will need to edit will be the Login one, as this is what WLD will call when we click on the “Broker Login” button in the Order Manager section.

If you haven’t already done so you may want to go and register a free demo account from CMS – you will need your newly registered demo username and password to send to the VT servers to login.

Once you have your username and password from CMS Forex you will need to enter these values into your VC# code.

In the procedure that is labelled Login(IWealthLabBrokerUpdate3 Broker, IWealthLabConnection Conn) we will add the code which will check to make sure we have entered the right login info and will then return to Wealth-Lab a successful “Connected” stamp as well as our Balance and UsableMargin values. If it doesn’t succeed we will want to return a connection “Failure” stamp as well as the reason.

This should make our code now look like this.

Once you have successfully changed the code according to your forex demo account’s details you simply need to Build Solution (Build > Build Solution – or hit F6).

Open up WealthLab, click on Order Manager, ensure CMS VC# is selected and hit “Broker Login”.

Hopefully within a matter of about 10-20 seconds you will see the word “Connected” followed by your demo accounts Balance and Usable Margin! If you get any errors check that you have entered correctly your username and password and have accType = 0.

Next we will continue by adding some more stuff into the Login procedure that Wealth-Lab needs to add to the Order Manager screen.

Tags: Auto Execution, Forex Trading

It’s been nothing short of frustrating!

Especially since I’ve never done programming on this level before – just a little bit of VBA.

But… we all need to start somewhere, and I’m a firm believer that if you REALLY want to learn something you either teach it or do something with an intended goal in mind.

At the moment it’s the latter: building a WLD CMS broker adapter.

Okay, here’s what I’ve learnt if you’re interested in doing this yourself or just waiting for me to pass out. Either way by writing this out it in here it allows some of my sanity to return!

Firstly, I can’t get Visual Basic’s 2005 Express Edition to create a foundational WLD broker script. But creating a script in Visual C# 2005 Express Edition was a breeze, and I think it has to do with one small tweak you need to do in VC# that, for the life of me, I cannot find in VB.

But firstly, here are the testing scripts just to make sure we’ve laid the correct foundation:

To create a project in either of them you just click on File > New Project > Class Library > Enter a class name such as VTAPI and then hit OK.

Copy all of the following code into the VB script that opens (copy it over everything).

Now what you’ll need to do is import the WLD COM object and this is done by clicking on Project > Add Reference > COM > select WealthLab Library 1.0 > click OK.

Lastly you’ll need to click on Project > VTAPI Properties… > Assembly Information > select “Make assembly COM-Visible > click OK.

Click on the Save All button (which is the button with three floppy disks – to the right of the normal save button) and save it as “VTAPI”. After when that is done click on Build > Build VTAPI and a dll file has now been created.

Was that easy or what?

Well… not so fast, if you can remember I said that the VB script doesn’t work. We can check that in WLD now, but first we need to create a file so that WLD knows where to look for our dll file.

We do this by simply creating the following file:

WLD VB CMS Broker Adapter

(change the path to wherever you stored the dll file, most people using Windows XP will only need to change the “@@@@@@” section in that file to their Windows XP username)

Save this file in the root directory of your Wealth-Lab Developer folder, for most people this will be c:\Program Files\Wealth-Lab, Inc\Wealth-Lab Developer 3.0\ and save it as BrokerAdapter_CMS.txt (this is important).

Crank up Wealth-Lab click on Order Manager make sure CMS Forex is selected and then click on Broker Login.

Hopefully (or should that be unfortunately?) you’ll come across an error message box that says:

System error. Code: 203.
The system could not find the environment option that was entered

(If you get an error message that says something to the effect of “The specified module could not be found…” it means that you’ll need to open the BrokerAdapter_CMS.txt file up and check that the path you’ve entered is indeed the path that leads to the dll file in the VTAPI/Release folder, if not change it accordingly.)

I have no idea what that error box means, but it’s not good because our adapter didn’t work. After trying a million different things such as regasm (etc) I still couldn’t get it to work.

Thankfully I had VC# installed… and it is here where we DO get the broker adapter to work.

Here’s the process:

Firstly, crank up the program, click on File > New Project > Class Library > Enter a name such as CMSAPI and then hit OK.

Copy all of the following code into the script window that opens – copy it over everything.

As we did for the VB script we’ll need to change some of the settings.

Click on Project > Add Reference… > COM > select WealthLab Library 1.0 > click OK.

Click on Project (again) > CMSAPI Properties > Assembly Information… > select “Make assembly COM-Visible” > click OK

After when you’ve clicked OK click on Build (underneath Application with the active window) then select Register for COM Interop.

Click on the Save All button and save it as CMSAPI and lastly click on the Build menu selection (up the top) > Build Solution.

Still with me?

Alright, we now need to create that file for Wealth-Lab. Which you can find one here, but again you’ll need to change it so that it points to the dll file you just created and make sure you save it as BrokerAdapter_CMSVC.txt (this is important).

Now for the test.

Open up Wealth-Lab, click on Order Manager, change the selection so that it points to CMS VC# and hit the Broker Login button.

Hopefully you should see the words “Connected” in the lower left hand panel with the balances of Cash $1,000.00 and Buying Power $999.00.

Woohoo!

In the next post we’ll connect to the Visual Trading API and get this thing really cooking!

(PS – does anybody know why the VB script won’t work? If anybody can get it to work I’d love to know how.)

Tags: Auto Execution, Forex Trading

One of the great things about the forex market is that enables customers to trade automatically.

Over the past several weeks I’ve dug around to try and find out more about what it takes to create a system that can trade automatically – preferably for the least amount of cost as possible.

Firstly though I had to find out what forex brokers allowed me to trade automatically, as not all forex brokers are created equal.

With some of the more popular brokers I was able to find that the following provided the capacity to allow you to trade your account automatically:

• FXCM
• Oanda
• Gain Capital (FOREX.com)
• CMS Forex

While I realise that there are other forex brokers which offer the ability to trade automatically (such as those that use MetaTrader) I wanted to find out which ones were able to interface/interact with my current backtesting platform Wealth-Lab Developer.

And so the next step began: having the forex broker’s API (which is the techno-speak acronym for allowing users to control the processes (etc) of their forex trading account) interact with the signals of my forex systems.

This left me with two options:
1) I could try and learn how to create the necessary software and write the code myself, or
2) Find a software that already does.

Option 2 sounded waay better, so I set out to try and find such software.

While my journey is still ongoing and incomplete I would like to detail a list of such software providers in case you too are looking for the same thing.

Fabre Factum US$699
Yet to receive a free trial subscription from this mob, but the attraction was the software’s ability to “supports Refco, FXCM, GAIN, Forex.com, FXAdvantage and CMS mini and regular accounts (demo and live accounts)”. Will detail more when I receive a free demo.

Trade Bullet US$35 – US$75 / month
Didn’t support any of the brokers I wanted, but I’ll include this in case some of you are using some of their supported brokers.

Trade Bolt (various costs depending on broker)
Offers trading through Gain Capital, doesn’t seem to support Wealth-Lab Developer.

Trade Robot US$500 – US$750
Supports FXCM only, doesn’t seem to support Wealth-Lab.

HyperOrder FREE!
Supports Interactive Brokers Workstation, Patsystems, MB Trading, FXCM, RefcoFx, MAN FX and MetaTrader. Doesn’t seem to work with Wealth-Lab.

API Trader FXTS US$25 / month (demo accounts) US$50 / month (live accounts)
Supports FXCM only and cross-platform (which could help those on non-Windows OS machines).

SnapDragon (Free?)
They are currently looking for beta testers who wish to trade from TradeStation onto Oanda’s platform.

Anyway, these have been the ones I’ve come across. As you can see not too many were helpful for my individual needs, or maybe they were and I just couldn’t tell.

So I moved on and looked at the first alternative of creating my own forex broker adapter for use in WLD. And to my surprise I found that Microsoft were giving away free Visual Basic, C# and C++ developer environments with their Visual Studio 2005 Express Editions (only until November this year) – which can help immensely with coding the required adapter.

So for now I’ll give it a bash and see how I go. I’ll be sure to report any successes here.

Lastly, I’m testing my crude forex broker adapter on CMS Forex’s API and demo account (all free and no paperwork is needed to sign to grab the API).

If anybody knows of any other forex trading robots or auto execution software that can interface with any of the above add your comments below.

Tags: Auto Execution, Forex Trading