General Reliability

[BIGRED]

I am exiting from a really bad experience with TradeStation. Month after month, issue after issue and as of today, I still can;t trade what I want, the way I want, when I want. Something is always being looked into, being fixed or a new bug surfaces.

My plan is to deploy different frequency charts of the same pair and different pairs on a day-trading frequency for 24/5 automated trading.

Therefore reliability of all systems is critical.

How is the data and trade server reliability? Meaning, during a week, do you notice being disconnected and or unable to carry out your trading.


Thanks
Don

[FXCM Help]

FXCM System Trading is doing fine with TradeStation with no major technical discrepencies or difficulties.

Please feel free to contact systemtrading@fxcm.com regarding automated trading.

[Kevin]

I've had the same experience with TradeStation, Don, so I've been exploring other alternatives as well. I think TS may fix things eventually, but why wait? (Data server outages, charts blanking and not refreshing after data server reboots at night, GAIN Capital trade servers unavailable, orders missed or rejected due to the above, etc. - not a good situation!)

FXCM with MCFX software may be viable, but MCFX data servers are still in beta and can't be relied on yet. The software is still in beta as well, but seems to work reasonably well at this stage. Supposedly, the beta will be complete by the end of March and I can give it a real test.

[FXCM Help]

Please feel free to contact sales@fxcm.com regarding MCFX software.

[ManDownUnder]

I've gotten to the point where my EA fails semi regularly, and I've had to write a seperate app to monitor it's status, and cron that to check the EA is alive every minute.

I'm tweaking the code today to confirm exactly how unreliable the FXCM server connection is but I have to say I'm not thrilled about how things look thus far.

Are there apparent reliability differences between the various servers (I.e. those in the US vs those in the Australia etc)?

Reporting the problem is one thing, but the whole idea of an EA is that it does it's thing without having to be watched minute to minute - and that's the very thing needed to report a problem. So we have a catch 22

Either we can rely on servers being available so EAs can run reliably, or we can't use EAs in an active capacity (we can still - in theory - use them to advise of when to trade).

However that also leads on to a question of liability. Who is liable for losses incurred because a trade could not be completed due to a server outage? I know it's contractually covered... I am responsible as I have signed away the risks in that regard, but all these points lead up to a heartfelt request for FXCM to address the issue.

I'm not clear where the faults are of course, but a few basic strategies will resolve many of them.

Cluster the key machines, locally and globally
Duplicate connections to the WWW
UPSs on each machine

etc etc etc.

From what I can see the FXCM setup and offering is a good one - but this is the archilles heel. Please address it.