First of all congratulations on your work developing the NT8 platform, I've appreciated the enhancements coming out with the updates - stability and functionality continue to improve.
I've been coding strategies specifically to work with FXCM, my preference would be to use Managed order types however there are certain limitations with this. Correct me if I'm wrong but with managed orders setting a stop-loss and take-profit does not then produce OCO orders held natively on FXCM's servers? for this reason I must go Unmanaged.
For the most part my Unmanaged order management seems to be working. Trades are entered in two units (StopMarket), both have the same initial stop-loss (StopMarket), the first also has a profit-target (Limit) which is OCO with the stop-loss. Trailing-stop algos are successfully updating the order levels, the OCO also works.
However I've noticed that in FXCM Trade Station, all orders appear as either 'entry' orders or OCO... for example; with a Long position, I would expect an order to Sell should be detected by their platform as an 'Exit' type orders, but at this stage it is not. Similarly, for Short positions I would expect BuyToCover type orders would also be detected as 'Exit' orders not 'Entry.
A while ago, I put in a request for us to be able to take advantage of the complex type OCO, or allowing nested profit-target and stop-loss orders which trigger once the parent order becomes activated - resulting in a position in the market (this has a clear advantage for a disconnect event: as any entry orders held with the broker have automatic stop-loss protection if triggered regardless of the NT8 platform status). Interactive Brokers also have facilities for this order type (Attached).
Has there been any progress in enhancing the Managed and Unmanaged order types? are there any planned improvements to these order methods at all?
For the Managed order types, it would be great to be able to utilise an OCO field, as I could then return my order management coding back to Managed, which would simplify everything somewhat and make it more robust. I prefer not to have the NT8 platform handling the interaction of profit-targets, stop-loss's and position sizes etc.
Also for Managed order types, why not let the user determine the label for these? rather than just calling them 'Profit target' and 'Stop loss', because I run up to 10 strategies at once it's very helpful for me to be able to see which orders belonged to which initial signal. In other words, we just need a few more potential arguments in the Managed order methods() to cater for the above.
Finally I've noticed with Chart Trader attached, we can see order levels. It would be fantastic if there was just a simple boolean selection in a menu somewhere to be able to show working order levels on the chart, and maybe a few user options to change colours or font sizes etc? cTrader is a great example of this sort of functionality.
Many thanks for your time, and keep up the great work!
best regards,
Chris Sellers
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