MT4/5 Bridge: Stability & Latency?

Hi

I'm considering a switch to Zorro, but the most suitable FX broker for our requirements only offers MT4, MT5 and CTrader.

So I'd either have to use the MT4/5 bridge, or write my own plugin to run against the CTrader Open API.

The MT bridge would be the lowest-effort solution. The CTrader API is Protobuf based and would be fast and reliable, but the developing and maintaining the plugin would be a pain.

So I have to decide if the MT bridge is "good enough". Unfortunately the Zorro manual is a bit offputting, saying: "MTR4 and MTR5 both have a heavy resource and bandwidth footprint. This can cause long response times, dependent on VPS performance and Internet connection."

We are fairly active traders and need low latency to minimise slippage. So my question is, with a properly resourced co-lo VPS, is the Metatrader bridge solution fast enough and stable enough for production use?

I'd very much appreciate feedback from anyone using this setup in production.

Bump

Is there really no-one who can help me with this?

Doing my own testing will be time-consuming and expensive, as I'd have to hire a VPS.

I really would be grateful for some feedback from anyone using the MT bridge in production.

Sadly these forum's are very very quiet.

You can get some free cloud credits for most cloud providers like GCP/AWS etc if you didn't want to hire a VPS.

The MT4/5 plugin is directly supported by oP Group. If you find bugs, you can direct them to oP Group support, and they will fix confirmed bugs.

Also of note: There is an CTrader plugin here [LINK].

A lot (if not most) of the things related to IB and MT4/5 in the manual are not (or no longer) true.

MT4/5 have low memory footprint, are not bandwith-hungry, are fast and stable.

However, MT4/5 in itself were created "for the brokers" allowing for the "last look", "spread management", etc..So, that MT4/5 side latency will depend on the broker a lot.
(as well as on proximity to the broker, quality of the network, your hardware, TCP stack tuning, etc)

Zorro will add some 30-50ms latency to a trade. How many of these are the bridge - difficult to say, i'd say very little.
C++ implementation will for sure work faster than lite-C.

MT5 is faster than MT4 and might/will have a higher tick count, but 1)broker feeds between MT4/5 can be different and 2) increased tick count might put more strain on CPU and might actually increase latency, if you are trading many instruments/systems.

Thanks Zheka - very helpful!

Have you traded the MT4/5 bridge live? Have you found it reliable?

Andrew - thanks for the link to the CTrader plugin. I thinking about writing one from scratch...

Yes.

Ah - that CTrader plugin was to the CTrader FIX API.

CTrader also offers something they call their Open API free with every account.

This is based on Google's robust Protobuf encoding protocol. It also offers historic prices and account info.

I guess I'll start with the MT5 bridge, knowing that I can develop a more elegant plugin for CTrader if I hit problems.

Do you roll the "R" when you say the word "robust"?

Anyways, OpenAPI sounds promising!