Just how transparent is cTrader/cServer ??

kricka
14 Jan 2017, 21:23

Back office plugins

The fact is that the back office broker plugins for MT4 is very well known. The reasons for these plugins for the broker are as you have already mentioned, is to be in total control of every aspect of the incoming orders, to the broker's own benefit of course. These plugins to my knowledge do not exist in either cTrader or the cAlgo's broker back office.

Spotware
15 Jan 2017, 13:28

Hello.

Thank you for the interesting question. To tell you a little bit more about our business model.

Spotware host all brokers servers, and Spotware is the only entity which has root access. The broker receives only a GUI application and a Web API which has no additional functionality to the GUI but can be integrated with their deposits and withdrawals portal. The broker can only change settings according to what Spotware allows and nothing whatsoever exists to harm traders, something we take very seriously and an ethos we built our brand around.

All server are connected to real price feeds via FIX API, Spotware also manages those integrations directly with the technology provider who supports them.

It would be impossible for a broker to compromise cServer.

Many thanks,

Spotware Team.

djh.paganprophet@gmail.com
15 Jan 2017, 18:44

RE:

Spotware said:

Hello.

Thank you for the interesting question. To tell you a little bit more about our business model.

Spotware host all brokers servers, and Spotware is the only entity which has root access. The broker receives only a GUI application and a Web API which has no additional functionality to the GUI but can be integrated with their deposits and withdrawals portal. The broker can only change settings according to what Spotware allows and nothing whatsoever exists to harm traders, something we take very seriously and an ethos we built our brand around.

All server are connected to real price feeds via FIX API, Spotware also manages those integrations directly with the technology provider who supports them.

It would be impossible for a broker to compromise cServer.

Many thanks,

Spotware Team.

 

Hello and thank you for your reply.

The broker can only change settings according to what Spotware allows..

Can you please expand upon this. What settings can be changed?

rmssf
18 Jan 2017, 07:24

RE: RE:

djh.paganprophet@gmail.com said:

Can you please expand upon this. What settings can be changed?

Here are some parameters that any broker needs to control:

Instrument configuration (markups, comission, swap, trading hours), price feeds and filters, order routing, user accounts, books, risk management.

moneybiz
19 Jan 2017, 13:02

RE:

Spotware said:

All server are connected to real price feeds via FIX API, Spotware also manages those integrations directly with the technology provider who supports them.

It would be impossible for a broker to compromise cServer.

cServer <- Manipulated Price Feeds Server <- LP Price Feeds Server
So you're claiming that there is no possibility for a server in the middle between cServer and liquidity provider's price feeds, because you directly manage this integration?

greybox
03 Feb 2017, 06:59

RE: RE: RE:

The sooner you accept that everything within this industry is highly manipulated, the sooner you'll be able to take advantage of it.
In fact, anything related to transactions of value, has and will always be manipulated as much as possible.

Jimmy
03 Feb 2017, 15:48

RE: RE: RE:

isomorph.0 said:

moneybiz said:

Spotware said:

All server are connected to real price feeds via FIX API, Spotware also manages those integrations directly with the technology provider who supports them.

It would be impossible for a broker to compromise cServer.

cServer <- Manipulated Price Feeds Server <- LP Price Feeds Server
So you're claiming that there is no possibility for a server in the middle between cServer and liquidity provider's price feeds, because you directly manage this integration?

 

LOL good one. i was just gonna post something like this.  good thing i came on this forum as i felt myself being lured in more and more by cTrader brokers, most of which, upon closer examination, are nothing but systematic internalizers (ICMarkets, MaxFX (TopFX), Kawase (TopFX), etc), and at best hybrid A/B-book brokers (FxPro, Pepperstone).

i am going to use a real life example, that of ICMarkets to illustrate the basic concepts pertaining to this discussion.

 if you read their legal documents, the PDS, that they are force to issue publicly thanks to the Australian regulator, ASIC, you will discover that:

1-  all ccys you trade with them are in fact FX derivative contracts, which they call Margined FX (think of it as CFDs on ccys), whose price is derived from the underlying rolling SPOT FX contract that is traded on the interbank market where professionals and institutional entities execute their trades;

2- the PDS document further states that if the underlying market, that is, the real market in a ccy that you happen to be trading suddenly disappears, that is, is not available for a some period of time, ICMarkets will MAKE a price for its clients, thus allowing trading to continue in that particular ccy even though there might not be any real market underlying such transactions, and of course, reserving themselves the right to refuse executing orders from the client if that does not suit their parameters--this is all in the legal docs--which means that if a trader happens to win big and there is no underlying market available at the time, they cannot hedge the risk properly, so they will refuse executing close orders. of course, if it's only a small number of traders and on aggregate the risk amount that sums up to a notional amount less than what is allowed in their operational risk capital allocation, they will eat the loss and let those traders take their profits, the traders not knowing or understanding what actually happened.  this is why the first question to ask any broker should always be:  

HOW DO YOU MANAGE YOUR CLIENT RISK? and based on the answers you get, you will know whether or not it is a broker that puts its interest first or tries to provide a fair win-win environment for both clients and broker;

remember how after the SNB liquidity even in January 2015 they refused to forgive their clients' negative balances? well, now you know why. same thing with SAXO Bank on the retail side of their business.

3- finally, when entering in a trade using any ICMarket provided platform, be it MT4 or cTrader, the counterparty is always ICMarket--not some other trading entity on their alleged ECN. so right there you can see that there is no TRUE ECN or STP or whatever meaningless acronym they happen to use in their marketing, regardless of the fact that your trading app might show you a DOM display with Level 2 quotes; and because their are always the trader's counterparty, they need to hedge that risk and open a similar trade in the real market (on which their contract price is based), which means they have to find a counterparty to match their trade.

therefore as moneybiz so clearly showed, the following could very well take place:

cTrader <-- cTrader Server <-- broker pricing engine <-- broker aggregator and other backend risk management software <-- PB and/or PoP feeds OR LP feeds (LP could also mean institutional ECN like HotSpotFX, for ex, which receives and aggregates institutional bid/ask volume from institutional market makers aka Tier 1 FX banks (Barckays, DB, etc))

 

you can see already that in this chain there is plenty of opportunity for mischief from the Tier 1 entities, down through the PBs and all the way down to the retail broker.  

for ex example, the broker's pricing engin after receiving all the data from the aggregator can spike the price on the ask or bid of any instrument if they wanted. or, they could instead just purchase an aggregator solution that let's them do that instead of building their own pricing engine: go the website of OLFA Trade to read all about such capabilities. 

and so in the end, whatever price data comes down into the cTrader server could be very far from pure. and even though it is of no fault of and out control from Spotware, everything upstream of cTrader server could be manipulated any which way the broker wants, such as padding the fill prices by specific amounts in order to extra more money from each trasaction on top of the commissions already paid, for ex, and these new prices are then fed into cTrader server.

 

fact:  "The city and state of New York and US Department of Justice have filed separate lawsuits against Bank of New York Mellon, alleging the world’s largest custody bank defrauded pension funds, US banks and millions of investors nationwide on currency transactions for 10 years."

source: https://www.ft.com/content/c3b27d78-eec7-11e0-959a-00144feab49a

so as you can see, if this is the environment at the highest levels of finance, what do you really expect at the bottom of the barrel, ie the retail sector?

 

but please, Spotware rep, feel free to prove me wrong.  we would all learn something new then.

Thank you,  i have just lost all trust in Spotware.

Jimmy
03 Feb 2017, 15:54

RE:

Spotware said:

Hello.

 change settings according to what Spotware allows and nothing whatsoever exists to harm traders, something we take very seriously and an ethos we built our brand around.

 

Spotware Team.

 

And what exactly can they change ?

Is it true what isomorph said above ? Can the broker alter the price feed ?

Jimmy
04 Feb 2017, 12:57

I was under the impression it was DMA Lvl-2 without interference.

I know enough now.

Thank you so much.

kricka
04 Feb 2017, 16:05

Guys, every platform has advantages and disadvantages. Especially when it comes to a retail platform. All the participant of the chain has to have some piece of the cut to be worthwhile for partners, brokers, and the platform builder. Nothing new in my opinion. To get all this for free, does not exist for a retail trader.

galafrin
05 Feb 2017, 00:02

RE: RE:

​The better part about unleveraged trading is mostly lower spread althought it is never abysmaly lower , I heard the CEO of LMAX saying he doesn't believe in spread lower than three-four ticks on the EURDOL for profitability reasons , then some retail brokers are not that far from HFT spread barrier.

Spotware
10 Feb 2017, 17:56

RE: RE:

moneybiz said:

Spotware said:

All server are connected to real price feeds via FIX API, Spotware also manages those integrations directly with the technology provider who supports them.

It would be impossible for a broker to compromise cServer.

cServer <- Manipulated Price Feeds Server <- LP Price Feeds Server
So you're claiming that there is no possibility for a server in the middle between cServer and liquidity provider's price feeds, because you directly manage this integration?

Spotware is responsible for establishing the connection to the broker’s liquidity provider, we are given credentials and FIX specifications to integrate. We do not integrate with any random companies, only well-known and trusted providers. 

It can take up to one month of development including extensive testing to integrate a new FIX API and we will not waste our time on unknown and unreliable companies, and of course the harm that could be caused to our reputation by this association. 

Hope this is clear. 

moriarty67
26 Apr 2017, 20:08

Just wanted to say thanks to ismorph.0 for this series of posts as I've learned more about the FX market from these two pages than I have in a year of reading other retail forums.

neenee1234
10 May 2017, 19:52

RE: RE: RE:

isomorph.0 said:

...

to help frame the discussion, we should keep the following in mind.  

...

just trying to do my part to help improve trading conditions in the retail FX market.  i believe tech companies have a significant role to play in this regard and at long last some real leadership is needed.

Many thanks indeed to ismorph.0 for this excellent text ..

I was running a LongTerm profitable EA (at Alpari UK, before it went belly-up) that suddenly started to behave funny, at which point i cut the EA and got my 70K back (no losses).

Only recently did i come across cTrader and that seemed to be a decent enough platform so i started a code re-write, from mql4 to C# (Java being my 'native' language).

With the complete lack of meaningfull comments from Spotware i'm afraid that i would be better of ceasing my rewrite and first find a proper party to trade 'with'. ismorph's points are all very valid and simple so the silence should be taken seriously (at least it is by me ;-)).

Will have a look at the other parties ismorph mentioned (except for Dukas, not solid enough) and see whether one of those supports a usable platform.

kricka
17 May 2017, 22:59

Platform of the future and of today

 cTrader is a decent platform for execution, it has some disadvantages as well as advantages compared to other platforms, Not major in my opinion. How you trade and how your robot is built up is the question here. For a trader to learn the API of cAlgo, it takes time and can not actually be compared to MT4. Learn the API of cAlgo and you will be fine with the result. Spotware does not have any obligation to work out the code for programmers. We as programmers have to solve it by the information available, ourself. The API I agree has to be updated with more examples and new method and functions to be the ultimate trading language for a platform of the future and of today. cAlgo needs time to evolve!