Protecting Our Ea's From The Brokers

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Hi ,

Do our brokers know which ea's or tactics we use?

I think that they do, and they even know our names, how?

1) I have a friend who owns a forex brokerage - and he told me outfront that the brokerage is following the best traders , and when the best traders open a position they(the brokerage) usually follows. How they do it ? Thats easy : They just print the log of every account holder, and screen the traders that have the best %wins and follow them.

2) The comments that we leave like : EA'S with names...

3) Our strategies can be followed by a printout of our trades. My main question is : Can the brokers copy our ea's from the Experts folder? Ea's are very small programs, and they are memory resident most of the time - that means that Metaquotes is "aware" of the ea's - but can it transmit the ea's back to the brokers ?

I think that yes !

fx-programmer

 
I think this is a bad question. Actually many people are looking for server-based solutions, like FXCM's Strategy Trading facility, which enables the user to trade without even having his computer on, and not having problems with internet connection or power outage. Of course in this case the broker has the EA and there's no need to "spy" on the traders technique. This kind of service is very expensive of this moment. The Strategy Runner FX, which is a third-party server-based platform, has been implemented only by GAIN, GFT Forex and Man Financial. Of these three, only Man Financial says about it on their website... And of course there are loads of cash needed and high commissions per trades. At least MT brokers offer micro mini lots and full hedging (i mean InterbankFX and Neuimex, (probably even Alpari) cause FXDD doesn't). Expensive full automation solutions can't work anyway for mini accounts (meaning under $500) trading full 10K lots. Anyway, many EAs are profit capable; many cases of failure in automatic trading should appear because the traders force EAs to work over sound trading parameters , applying excess leverage and resulting in gradual losses due to EAs false positives..
 
I think Finger has his finger on something very important. It's a very good question and it would be great if a metaquotes moderator, broker, or someone in the system could respond and answer the questions fully. One danger is if a EA does particularly well and a large broker or even a bank notices and uses it... they might be able to enter and exit faster than the creator of the EA, and then perhaps move the market enough to screw over the creator! It sounds far-fetched, but it doesn't matter, since we're talking about principles, and far-fetched things in the present often are not so in the future. We have to remember that online forex trading open to the masses is still in it's very infant stage. I've even contemplated "what if every average american wrote a successful EA and everyone made lots of money off it- this doesn't seem like a sustainable economic condition"

I'm sorry TheEconomist, but I'm not sure what your point is. Are you saying 1) we're moving towards servers holding the EA's so everyones EA's will be known? and 2) There's just too many EA's to worry about one being picked over the other, 3) many fail so it's not worth it for the broker to investigate each EA?

Kindly,
Samson
 
Samson, You got my ideas pretty well. Why would they need our EAs? They have: 1. the bid-ask spread (riskless profit) 2. loads of cash and access to interbank trading - they can arbitrage all the time with fancy platforms like Reuters Dealing 3000 Spot 3. all that crappy advertising and forex education stuff with "high leverage", "only $250", "tight stops".They're practically teaching investors how to blow up their accounts... The more stops, the more's for them. I think that nowadays no honest broker would allow mini accounts when minimum lot is 10K Why in God's name to speculate when you can arbitrage the markets?
 
FinGeR:


My main question is : Can the brokers copy our ea's from the Experts folder? Ea's are very small programs, and they are memory resident most of the time - that means that Metaquotes is "aware" of the ea's - but can it transmit the ea's back to the brokers ?
No. It is impossible in the MetaTrader platform.

Your expert advisor program (script, custom indicator, library, dll, etc) is YOUR PRIVATE PROPERTY.
 
To be more specific, the EA runs on your local system. They cannot see it. All they see is where you are entering and exiting your trade.

Lance...
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