I spent a few hours testing MT4 yesterday evening. It seems fine for low-volume paper/life testing. All I need from the product is a simple order control tool (in case a manual intervention is required) and a snappy charting facility. I would not use their language for implementing even simple algos, but MQL4 is reach enough for me to code a simple bridge between my quant box and MT4.
qroach wrote on 01/23/09 at 13:18:20:dump some output from your artillery to a file periodically, I mean buy/sell orders and then write a small network app that would scan it periodically and send the requests on its' own (can be 100 lines in C++/Java).
Metatrader can be made to read periodically from a text file too - no problems (I guess 20 lines would be enough here). But do you really deal with bucketshops or you don't care?
This is exactly what I am planning to do. I was initially thinking of writing a custom socket DLL for MT4 (that would connect to the black box), but with the expected order message rate it is not really necessary.
BTW, have you tried streaming quotes
from MT4? If so, could you shed some light on how it can be done? (for some models, I want to see what the broker behind MT4 is quoting in the black box)