I have been with FXCM as a Demo trader since Sep.2012 and, while I am very happy with the customer service and the trading platform, I wanted to ask this simple question:
in order to help me prepare for the week ahead, is there any way to access the platform at the weekend?
Sometimes it seems accessible, and sometimes not… Saturdays are ideal for me to do chart analysis but usually the site is closed for maintenance… This is very frustrating as I cannot review my trades and prepare for the week ahead on a regular basis… Sometimes the site IS accessible, but it is hit and miss…
Can you make any technical suggestions to overcome this obstacle?
I hope this has not been covered in a previous thread, in which case please just send me the link and I will read through it… If not, I hope this question will be of interest to other FXCM users.
Since you 've been trading from Sept. 2012 you should have seen that the trading platform is usually online
either Saturday or Sunday, sometimes even both days. Since I also do my (pretty time consuming) analysis
during the weekend in order to prepare for the next week, I haven’t faced serious issues… If the platform
is online on Saturday I do my analysis on Saturday, if not I do it on Sunday. I don’t think there is a way to
bypass this with FXCM’s platform, but if I REALLY need to see some charts I jump to netdania! Finally, if you
are reviewing your weekly trades in the weekend why don’t you print out a trading report in the last Friday hours?
Hope that helps…
Hiya, thank you for the comments, and I know that it ‘usually’ works but I wanted to reassure myself that I was not missing a trick … I work during the week and I want to stop trying exhausting myself … The weekend is much better for setting up, when I have a clearer head. Cheers
Thanks PipMeHappy for leading me to this thread. I had the exact same concerns. I have several charts loaded with custom indicators and would really like consistent access to them thru the weekend.
It would be nice to know how these maintenance periods work…how frequent they are, is there any substitute, etc.?
Thank you for the suggestion, I have forwarded it to the developers.
Currently you can work around it by one of the following ways:
You can view charts in Backtester (please find the icon on the toolbar of Trading Station). But I’m not sure, that the historical data will be available during the weekend (step Market Data when you start backtesting), so it is better to download it beforehand.
Use a snapshot. To open a snapshot in Trading Station please go to Charts -> File -> Snapshots -> Open Snapshot.
At this time, I don’t have any additional solutions for you beyond what Spiperman and Valeria suggested. Keep in mind that since the forex market trades 24 hours a day, the weekend is the only opportunity we have to perform maintenance and updates on our servers. I have passed your feedback onto our developers to see if they can add a feature to make accessing offline charts easier during the weekend. For now, Valeria’s suggestion works best.
The trading desk is closed from 5 PM Friday to 5 PM Sunday New York time. While it’s possible for the servers to be offline for maintenance anytime outside trading desk hours, in my experience, you can usually log into Trading Station for about an hour after the trading desk closes on Friday at 5 PM. You can also usually access the platform for a couple of hours before the trading desk opens on Sunday at 5 PM.