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Hey everyone,
I decided to share my tech stack and account types. Maybe it will help somebody...
I trade currencies. My only trading platform is Metatrader 5 (MT5). My trading iss fully automated through my own Expert Advisors ( EAs). I backtest using both MT5's Strategy Tester and my own python notebooks.
MT5 is, in my opinion, the most popular, versatile, and user-friendly trading platform. Depending on the broker, it can be used to trade Forex, CFDs, stocks, futures, commodities, crypto, etc. It providess high-quality historical data, automatically downloads data according to your chosen modeling method (1m OHLC, real ticks, etc.), and allows exporting everything into different formats. For example, my python notebooks require price data in CSV format.
Everything is fast, convenient, customizable, and easy to automate.
If a broker doesnt support MT5 natively, it can be connected through a bridge. I used MT5 to trade through Interactive Brokers for a while.
Some arrogant snobs like to ridicule MT5. They often claim that "you are not really trading the market" because MT5 does not route orders directly to an exchange.
This argument demonstrates a misunderstanding of the difference between a trading platform, a broker, and an exection venue.
MT5 is just a front-end platform. Whether your order is routed to an exchange, a liquidity provider, an ECN, or handled internally depends entirely on the broker and the instrument being traded.
For example:
* If you trade Forex CFDs through a market maker, your trade will be internalized by the broker.
* If you trade Forex through an STP/A-Book broker, your order is routed to the liquidity providers (the interbank market).
* If you trade real futures through a futures broker that supports MT5, the order can be routed directly to the exchange.
* If you trade real stocks through a broker that offers exchange-traded shares on MT5, the order can be routed to the stock exchange.
The fact that a trader uses MT5 tells you absolutely nothing about how their orders are executed.
* My trading accounts are with two A-Book (STP) brokers under Tier 1 regulation.
* My investing account is with Interactive Brokers (I buy and sell stocks once a year according to my own strategy).
As for development, I design and program my software. I write the pseudocode, and an LLM translates it into Python and MQL5.
To dinosaurs:
No, there are no errors and no bugs. Everything works perfectly. You simply need to know how to program, write pseudocode and howw to interact with an LLM. All developers work this way nowadays. It's not always easy, but with a human coder it can be much harder.
Humans should know the basics of coding and the programming languages they use. They should know how to compile, test every function, every use case, and account for unexpected situations.
In the 21st century, humans are not supposed to waste their time and effort writing computer code. That would be ridiculous. Humans should use their brains to create and develop. Let the machine write the code
Good luck and much success to everybody! Including the dinosaurs 😉