MT5 is an amazing platform but needs some major improvements
Yes, absolutely agreed, trading-specific MetaEditor is a great thing to have when programming trading-specific and, even more, MT5-specific tasks. But it's quite obvious that quant-style strategies have a substantial and constantly growing ingredient that belongs more to the signal analysis field and completely finance-independent statistics than anything else. So, the reason for MetaQuotes to allow convenient development of such processing modules in a standard IDE (like VS) is simple: it would facilitate migrating tools from math and applied physics right into the MT5 garden. Please don't see my comments as any criticism. I'm just trying to look ahead and I can easily see joint projects where a trader-developer working directly in MetaEditor cooperates with a digital communications engineer that prefers VS IDE and his libraries. If MT5 makes it easy for them, it will become a platform of choice for projects that now are done behind tightly shut doors of large banks and financial institutions.
My second comment, concerning handling of tick data, is motivated by similar concerns. Since Einstein we know that the time as we perceive it is just an illusion. Trading data feed may be the best example. It is ticks that define time (digital time of events). If needed, you can add clock time to it but strategies for high-volume round the clock market like EUR/USD often need it just to know when the end of session or weekend brakes happen. So, it is not only about periodicity. 10-tick (or any n-tick) data feed is essentially different from any n-second or sub-second data feed. Every bar contains ticks, there are no brakes in data flow, etc. Some very simple and effective strategies generate only about 10 trades per day but work best when calculating their indicators on real 10-tick data.
Summarizing, I'm very positively impressed by MT5 capabilities and the comfort that it delivers to traders and developers. But the system is advanced and it is destined for advanced projects. MetaQuotes should not create any unnecessary obstacles in the road ahead and should not limit MT5 to doing just the same things that MT4 is doing. It can't be difficult to open the possibility of developing computational modules in VS C++ IDE and it should be equally easy to handle real tick data. Just these two features added to the current system would provide more compelling reasons to switch over to MT5 from any other platform. Traders and developers will make brokers doing just that, believe me.
- Free trading apps
- Over 8,000 signals for copying
- Economic news for exploring financial markets
You agree to website policy and terms of use
I installed MT5 just a week ago. A few days were enough to see enormous advantages of this platform. Functions, user interfaces, cloud-base optimization agents and many more features simply play into developer's hands. But two problems, I would call them serious design mistakes, surfaced immediately.
First, why on Earth, while recommending and using Visual Studio C++ compiler, you have not decided to let customers do ALL their development and debugging in Visual Studio environment? I don't think that MetaQuotes Software has any business in competing with Microsoft's VS that widely recognized as the best IDE on the market. Having a built-in compiler and debugger may be a good choice for small scale development but larger projects, e.g. EAs with advanced analytical support using 3rd-party libraries, would certainly benefit from a standard fully-featured IDE provided by VS. I saw some explanations about "security" but that can't be taken seriously.
Second, why MT5, especially 64-bit version with its huge computational power, does not handle real tick data? I have just finished development and optimization of an interesting strategy on another much simpler platform. It was absolutely clear that the only way to succeed with that strategy was to use 10-tick data assembled from the original 1-tick data feed. Running optimization on 2-month worth 1,500,000 10-tick bars was not a problem and using this kind of data feed greatly simplified incoming bars processing, much easier to perform in discrete time domain defined by those bars (as opposite to 1-min or 1-sec bars).
Overlooking this kind of problems very sadly contributes to MT5 getting lost in no men's land: it's too complicated for MT4-level brokers and users and too limited for IT-experienced developers.
I sincerely hope that MetaQuotes will decide to resolve above described problems.