Stupidly Good EA - worthless and I don't know what it is doing - page 3

New comment
 

I want to raise an alternative explanation (which I have privately discussed with phillip in the past) and would appreciate opinions - maybe the platform doesn't offer Tick data capabilities (history-center/tester) because MT4 brokers don't own this data...? Maybe they just can't give it away because of legal issues... Perhaps the contract they have with their liquidity providers might state that they can't give that data away?

Edit: this is just a theory... I have no actual knowledge of this.

 
gordon:

I want to raise an alternative explanation (which I have privately discussed with phillip in the past) and would appreciate opinions - maybe the platform doesn't offer Tick data capabilities (history-center/tester) because MT4 brokers don't own this data...? Maybe they just can't give it away because of legal issues... Perhaps the contract they have with their liquidity providers might state that they can't give that data away?

That's definitely a possibility. Though I still think that phillip may be underestimating the impact of having to deal with (store, download, process etc) tick data. For reference, Hotspot's data FAQ says "A limit of 4 months for BBO, 15 days for SNP, and 5 days for TKS has been put in place. This limit has been set to prevent users from creating files larger than 4GB". Admittedly Hotspot BBO data is more heavyweight than what MT4 would require for "tick data", but it's still a major potential burden.
 

Full disclosure - I really don't care about tick data. I avoid it for a lot of reasons.

My interest for engaging in the "why no tick data" conversations that sporadically crop up is more from the perspective of "why is this choice made for me, given the sundry list of other resource consuming choices I have the flexibility to choose from"?

The logic is not self-consistent and that bothers me.

And tick data is just one aspect of it. Why no spread data? (ask prices) Why no rollover rates? Creating a MT5 hst file format that logged this extra bit of info would not be nearly as resource consuming as storing tick data. Heck with MT3 at least we did get to store the ask and bid prices so backtesting wasn't intentionally borked in that respect. MT4 took a step back in this regard.

Gordon makes a valid point, if his theory is true then it would go some distance towards explaining the situation. But to me this has cause and effect reversed. Why would MQ assume years ago that all future brokers would not have the opportunity, nor want the option to differentiate themselves, of letting their customers retain tick data? They didn't make the assumption that no broker would offer fractional pip pricing, that wasn't a hardcoded barrier for the brokers.

Tick data is this black-box bermuda triangle blackout zone where no one will say anything official and yet it is the elephant in the room as we all look at our feet and just can't shake that feeling that something just doesn't make sense here. I can have 2billion candles of M1 data stored in an hst file but zero choice to have the platform store and use tick data? Really?

 
Looks like I got Sen-Sai all Ticked off with my Tick question ( :) Just trying to lighten the mood). Anyway Mt5 would not install on my computer because It doesn't like my CPU. Phillip you are 100% correct, if I knew nothing about data-bases and installed a Trading software in 2010, I would expect it to have Tic data. However for the wonderful people who brings us this Meta-Trader for Free, they must be doing something right for being Industry standards.
 
ubzen:
However for the wonderful people who brings us this Meta-Trader for Free, they must be doing something right for being Industry standards.

I acknowledge that my choice of words and frequency of posting here are apt to give rise to the impression that I am worked up by the topic of tick data and so forth but I actually consider myself to be a pragmatist. I use MT4 exclusively for a reason, that reason being that it simply works. I prefer to get to know the platform's limitations more intimately not so that I can better fight against them but rather so that I can better know how to avoid them.

Regardless the reason, I take it serious that neither MQ nor the brokers seem all that interested in letting us get cozy with trading at the tick level. Figure out a way to defeat their initial barriers to entry and they'll just come back at you with build N+1 that contains a better mousetrap (or eliminates the one you were previously exploiting). Fine, I can live with that, I'll head the other direction then and work with M5 and higher only, etc. Work with the system, not against it.

(not that I feel this is the right philosophy or my path is the true path but because I simply personally haven't got anything better going for me at the moment, others here may have found solutions to problems that I can't even begin to fathom)
 
1005phillip:

I can have 2billion candles of M1 data stored in an hst file [...]

I'm still not disagreeing with your broader point, but I don't think this matter of detail is correct. You can set the max-bars parameter to this value, but that doesn't mean it will get honoured. The strategy tester is known to have a limit of 2GB on fxt files, and it's very likely that the rest of MT4 has been coded to expect that a file's size can be expressed as a 32-bit integer (whether signed or unsigned). Dealing with 64-bit file sizes in calls to the Win32 API is cumbersome. If the code isn't doing it in one place, it's probably not doing it in the others. And then there's the FAT32 limit on file sizes, which I assume applies to a fair proportion of MT4 users.
123
New comment
Reason: