Subtle Issues on Trade Copying MT4 to Futures

So I have been going through the setup information for trade copying to my Apex Tradovate futures accounts and it looks like there are some subtle issues associated with copying forex to futures, and those subtle issues are not documented very much in the classroom. So I will ask here and I hope the answers prove useful to everyone in this situation.

First, the trade copier used is Duplikium, since that is one of the only cloud-based trade copiers that copies from MT4 to Tradovate. Sadly that copier is pretty expensive for multiple accounts - if you have more than say 5 or 6 accounts you are better off just copying to one account and then using Tradesyncer (for example) to copy from your first Tradovate account to all your other Tradeovate accounts. I have another post that discusses this.

But one important aspect of futures trading that is not present for forex is the daily no trade period between 5:00-6:00PM NY time. Apex states that you need to close all trades by 4:59PM. So, it is perfectly possible that the MT4 account signals a trade during the NY session and does not close that before 4:59PM. So we manually have to close our positions by 4:59PM every day, correct?

This brings up a question about the Duplikium trade copier. If we manually close the trade on all our Tradovate slave accounts, by 4:59PM, then what happens at 6:00PM when trading reopens? Does Duplikium reopen those trades at the new price? Or does Duplikium only copy new trades? In other words, is it a state based copier or an event based copier?

If it only copies new trades, I assume that means that if we had to close the trade in Tradovate accounts, but it was open in the MT4 master, and we want to get back in, we would have to do so manually on all our Tradovate accounts. But we would then have to manually monitor the MT4 account to see when the trade closes on MT4 because that closing trade would not be duplicated in the Tradovate accounts because our manual trade is a different trade from the one in MT4. Is that correct?

How often does this happen? Are there lots of trades, or only the odd one or two that MT4 keeps open after the close of the NY session at 5:00PM NY time?

And is it ever the case that MT4 closes a position between 5-6PM when futures is not trading?

For those of you who copy trades to Apex futures Tradovate (or any other futures broker), what is your standard practice for this? Do you just always check your Tardeovate accounts before 5PM every trading day, and close any open trades and disable the copier? And just take the win or loss at that point and wait for the next trade? Then restart the copier an hour later after the market reopens?

If this is a somewhat common occurrence, and we manually have to close trades at 4:59, and our Duplikium copier does not do that automatically for us, then autotrading with this is far less auto than I suspected. It looks like we pretty much have to use Duplikium to go from MT4 to one Tradeovate account. But after that, we have several cheaper options than just using Duplikium for everything. As I discussed before, we can use Tradesyncer to copy from one Tradeovate account to more Tradovate accounts. This becomes cost effective over Duplikium when you have around 6 accounts. A second option is this: why not just use a VPS and keep the Tradovate website open in the browser on the VPS, and just use the free Tradovate copier? Tradovate has a Timed Flatten Account feature where you can tell it to close all open trades and cancel all orders at a specific time (like 4:40Pm or so). Or, since Apex comes with a free Ninjatrader license, you could also run Ninjatrader on the VPS and do two things. One is that you can use the Replikanto trade copier to trade from one Tradovate account to all your others. Replikanto is just a one time charge of $199 for one machine. No recurring charges. In addition to that, Ninjatrader has an Auto Close Position feature you can turn on that closes all your positions.

Also, I confirmed with Duplikium that they do not yet have a setting on their trade copier that stops the copier at any specific time. We have to manually go to the Duplikium website and stop the copier at 5PM and restart it at 6PM.

So what happens if Duplikiu tries to send a trade to tradovate during this no trade time? I would assume the tradovate account would not take the trade, but does it break anything? Or it just launches a warning? How much damage is there if we forget to shut off the trade coiper during this no trade period, since the Tradovate accounts should be accepting trades anyway?

The bottom line is this: While copying forex (MT4) to forex (MT4) may be pretty hands off, forex (MT4) to futures is definitely not. For futures, we still need to manually interact with the trade copier every day. With any cloud copier (Duplikium or the combination of Duplikium+Tradesyncer) we have to manually close open trades. With a VPS and the Tradovate website or Ninjatrader platform, we can automatically close open trades at market close. But in either case, we still have to manually go to the Duplikium website to shut off the trade copier (at least until Duplikium rolls out this feature, which could be weeks or months or never) and then restart it after 6PM, which is a pain. It is manageable for me since that is 2PM-3PM in my timezone, but it sure would be a pain in other parts of the world where it may be the middle of the night.

Sadly, the only way to really fix this if Duplikium doesn't get their act together is to write a custom MT4 EA and a custom NT Strategy to act as master/slave for the copying, and have the MT4 EA stop copying between 5-6PM. But that's a lot of work :-(

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