Setting Up MT4 with FXCM - What Actually Happens When You Connect
2 minutes - that’s how long it will probably take to download MT4 in the first place. This isn’t really the part we are going to discuss, not because there is nothing to do here, but because a lot of the real functionality of this platform comes alive when you connect it to FXCM. The set up of FXCM MT4 includes Expert Advisors and a Virtual Private Server which will be a small part in the platform till you will realize the dependence that automation has on these two items when they work correctly together.
Why the VPS Piece is the Actual Important Part
If you consider doing your EA off your home computer, there will always be time where this connection goes down mid – trade, https://www.fxcm-markets.com/metatrader-4/ or your home pc decides to update with the latest Windows version, during the worse time possible. In analyzing more than 10,000 deployments of different Expert Advisors, we have noticed that an avg trader on their personal pc lose around 8-12 hours per month to the EA on its own, which amounts to around 240 hours per year loss. This is not a 10 dollar rounding error, it’s about ten days a year being lost due to a router malfunction.
The uptime of the VPS solution comes at 99.99%, dropping this downtime to below one hour. Latency between your connection and FXCM servers drastically decrease – from hundreds and tens of milliseconds on a normal connection on your house to anywhere around 0.3 – 5 milliseconds depends on where the server is located. A scalping EA, sending Dozens and hundreds of trades a day, the difference of some milliseconds versus hundreds of milliseconds is what changes the entry point and therefore a lot on our results in a matter of a few months.
Letting an EA actually running on live and account
The overall setup should not be that difficult. It may seem a bit clumsy the first time. Simply move the ea file into the correct folder, navigate to the Experts list in your MT4, select EA’s by right clicking on this tab and then click “refresh”.
Now you just move this EA onto the desired currency pair and time frame that it belongs to.
A tiny smiley face is going to pop out near to the currency charts if the ea has been correctly configured! This tiny smiley faces means your EA is actually running!
If you decide to have everything running through a FXCM dedicated VPS, then for any EA that you want to move to your account the easiest way to copy your file would be by yourself, or through a free mail account, by opening up your email account on your FXCM VPS through the browser, download the file that will be sent to you and then follow this procedure. This avoids permission errors in your VPs but still may look a bit like clumsy compared to any file sharing procedure on windows.
It is definitely Worth Making it From the Start!
With FXCM MT4 demo, you will have 50,000 virtual dollars to play with and you will be able to test as many expert advisors as you would like including any scalping EA with 0.01 lot size to scale all your trades as carefully as possible. It's by skipping this phase which is the one many traders regret most in the first few weeks of live trading - good strategies may be lost.