FXDD announced today its successful registration with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) and its newly enacted status as an official member of National Futures Association (NFA). Going forward, FXDD will operate as a fully registered Forex Dealer Member (FDM) in accordance with the rules and regulations of CFTC and NFA.

“We have always focused on compliance and made sure we were up to speed on new changes in the applicable rules and regulations. Throughout the registration process we worked closely with the NFA and came to appreciate the hard work and effort the NFA staff puts in to manage a firm through the registration process. Needless to say, I am glad that we’ve finally obtained member status. This is a very important and long awaited moment in the life of our company,” said James E. Green, Chief Legal Counsel and Head of Compliance for FXDD.

FXDD, headquartered in New York City, is a leading online foreign exchange trading firm dedicated to providing superior customer service, powerful trading technology, and reliable streaming liquidity. We provide our services to individual and institutional traders, hedge funds, commercial entities, brokerage firms and money managers around the world. FXDD offers 24-hour Forex trading by way of its trading platforms, which include: MetaTrader, MTXtreme, FXDDTrader, PowerTrader and FXDDAuto. The Company’s services currently provide competitive interbank pricing, no-interest accounts, and fully automated execution. FXDD also provides competitive bid-to-ask spreads (2-3-wide on most majors for retail platforms and 0-2 pips on most majors for institutional platforms). 

This week I've been focused on the upcoming MetaTrader 5 release but other things have still been happening in the Forex world.

Here's what happened on Turtle Soup this week:

 Monday, 8th
George Soros said that China's influence will grow faster than expected

Tuesday, 9th
GAIN Capital's FOREX.com Named Best Retail FX Platform by Profit & Loss Magazine for Second Consecutive Year

Wednesday, 10th
Alpari launches forex trading platform in India
Persian Gulf Monetary Union Agreement is finally signed
MT5 Series Part 1: MetaTrader 5 Offers Market Depth Data

Thursday, 11th
Crown Forex appeals regulator bankruptcy ruling
MT5 Series Part 2: A Sneak Peek At MetaTrader 5

Friday, 12th
Oanda Loses Alexander Shirokov to CIBC
MT5 Series Part 3:Bigger Profits With MetaTrader 5 Expert Advisors

Next week, a video interview with Stanislov Starikov, the chief developer for MetaQuotes' MQL4 and MQL5.

The long-awaited release of MetaTrader 5 is just around the corner and, believe me, it will be well worth the wait. There is no upgrade path from MetaQuotes' MetaTrader 4 trading platform to MetaTrader 5.  MT5 is a brand new platform and expert advisors, custom indicators, scripts or autotrading robots that run on MT4 will not be compatible with MT5.  

MT5 has a new integrated development environment called MQL5 which includes MetaEditor 5, MetaTrader 5 Strategy Tester and MetaQuotes Language 5 (MQL5).  



Execution speed is everything when developing autotrading scripts that sometimes need to crunch huge amounts of data in conjunction with real-time price movements. The new MQL5 boasts up to 20 times faster execution speed than the current MQL4 language that is used to develop custom EAs and indicators for MetaTrader 4.  

MetaQuotes has made significant improvements and enhancements in MQL5 over MQL4 that autotrader developers will probably appreciate much more than the average trader but will ultimately benefit the retail trader just as much.  MetaQuotes has made MQL5 an object oriented language which, for programmers, makes the development of EAs quicker, easier and more flexible. The MQL5 programming environment incorporates intellisense which, as most techies would agree, speeds up the development process.  It also has a built-in debugger for testing.

MetaTrader 5 Strategy Tester is the built-in test harness for expert advisors.  It enables a programmer to stress test a newly developed EA on historical data before releasing it to a real trading environment. Strategy Tester features a "beefed-up" reporting facility that not only detects weak points in an EA under development, but also compares its test results to other EAs. This makes for more accurate and efficient code and therefore, better autotraders.  The expert advisors and custom indicators produced by MT5 will be faster, more accurate, and more profitable.

Next, and interview with Stanislav Starikov, the chief developer for both MQL4 and MQL5.

Forex broker Crown Forex said it was appealing against a bankruptcy ruling by Swiss regulator FINMA and might also sue the regulator.

Crown has 30 days to appeal the bankruptcy ruling and claims that FINMA ignored its earlier appeal against the liquidation.  FINMA is standing its ground saying that Crown's problems started with a money-laundering probe and that it has applied the law correctly.  More...

MetaTrader 5 has been under development for two years and beta testing will finally begin this summer.  MT5 is a complete rewrite of the MetaQuotes platform and is not backward compatible with MT4.  So if you purchased expert advisors to trade on MT4 and you plan to use MT5, you might as well throw those MT4 EAs away.  They won't work on MT5.

MetaTrader 5 offers several new features that may make it necessary for retail traders to adjust to new terminology and, possibly, a new way of thinking about order processing and trade management.

First, a new order type - Exchange - will now enable trading of stocks, futures and options directly from the MT5 platform in addition to the Forex order to which MT4 traders are already accustomed.



The addition of Depth of Market data, which I mentioned in my previous post, will also give traders access to market data previously not available.

Traders will also have to get familiar with the differences between how MetaQuotes is defining position, order, and trade. An Order is now defined as a request to execute a trade operation. A Position is the total state of trades on a specified financial security; and a financial security can only have one position. So, two 1-lot EURUSD orders placed in MT4 are now reported in MT5 as a single 2-lot position. Multiple buy-sell orders in MT4 are consolidated and reported as a single position in MT5.

Order	Buy 1.00 EURUSD	Buy 1.00 EURUSD	Sell 3.00 EURUSD
MetaTrader 5 Position	Buy 1.00 EURUSD	Buy 2.00 EURUSD	Sell 1.00 EURUSD
MetaTrader 4 Position	Buy 1.00 EURUSD	#1 Buy 1.00 EURUSD #2 Buy 1.00 EURUSD	#1 Buy 1.00 EURUSD #2 Buy 1.00 EURUSD #3 Sell 3.00 EURUSD

I'm sure this will inspire lots of conversation about hedging as traders try to understand how this will impact their trading. 

MT4 gave the trader 9 timeframes from Monthly down to 1-Minute. MT5 gives the trader 21 timeframes with which to analyze quotes as long as the timeframe adheres to their rule of multiplicity: one hour must contain the integer number of minute periods. So, the following timeframes comply with this rule: M1, M2, M3, M4, M5, M6, M10, M12, M15, M20 and M30.

There is lots more to talk about with this new release. Next, MT5's impact on autotrading.