Alpari UK pushing MetaTrader 5 with great promo
By accident I just visited the site of Alpari UK and noticed that their MT5 offering now is enabled for live trading (last time I looked it was only open for demo trading). MetaTrader 5 hasn’t been able to replace the old and trusted version 4 despite being available for quite a long time now.
Alpari UK is apparently hoping this will change if they sweeten the deal a little and is currently offering a MT5 ECN account without commission (!). And you only even have to deposit $200 to test it. The promotion is valid until 2nd of July 2012. Unfortunately I have no EAs to trade the account with, but hopefully I can convert some of my old MQL4 bots without too much trouble.
It is possible to trade micro lots and DOM is available (6 levels). Sounds really good when combined with razor thin spreads without commission (after the promo they will be $6/lot round turn, which is competitive for sure). I’m signing up as I’m writing this 
Check it out: http://www.alpari.co.uk/en/trading-accounts/ecn.html (don’t know if you get any rebate by signing via Cashbackforex.com since you don’t pay any commission, but it never hurts either so do it. After the promotion is ended it could be a good idea).
Sounds like a good deal, but the main problem is MetaTrader 5 itself - in the way that it handles trades per currency.
Main differences being that MT4 handles BUY and SELL tradfes as separate orders per pair PER Magic Number. When I took a look at MT5 - it doesn’t do this and insteads compounds a buy and sell order into one. I also couldn’t find a way to separate out EA’s based on different charts of the same pair.
For me - it’s certainly a let down after using MT4, especially knowing the improvements theyve introduced into MT5 with the optimisation and backtesting etc.
Hi Matt.
I’m quite frustrated by MT5 / MQL5.
Some of the changes makes no sense at all, almost seems like they’ve changed just for the sake of changing. The change in order/deal/position-handling I can still understand, for other instruments than currencies this is the normal way. But they shouldn’t have enforced this limited model on forex.
I’m still working on the conversion of one of my EAs, so I haven’t actually started trading with MT5 yet. The strategy tester is, as you say, much improved. But also it is still lacking in parts. The most obvious is the lack of tick data and proper handling of ask/bid pricing. I can’t understand that they don’t include this (as well as correct handling of historical swaps). Even with the excellent scaling with multicore cpus and distributed agents, backtests in MT5 is useless for anything other than simple debugging. Optimization of complex variables is worthless.
BR Johan