On 1 October 2009 TradeCommander will be suspended indefinitely and removed from Live and Simulation SaxoTrader platforms.

Quoting Saxo, “At 0800 GMT (1000 CET) on 1 October, all running systems will be stopped. Therefore Clients with active trading systems should stop these systems (and if they wish, export/save/print them) before the end of September 2009. Open positions will not be closed, so Clients should manage these positions themselves even though they may be warned by the system not to do so.”

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This people, is bad news for all parties involved. Bad news for traders, but even more bad news for Saxo. Firstly, there aren’t too many options for autotrading outside of the monopoly that is Metatrader, so if you’re not too keen on the actual MT4 platform itself, then it’s a real kick in the teeth.

Secondly, Saxo, despite being one of the largest forex brokers around, aren’t exactly a shining beacon of light in the forex world. They have their fair share of trader complaints, their web platform is relatively slow; point being – they’re already a few steps behind their forex broker competitors, and now that they’ve shut the door on what was actually one of their better offerings, TradeCommander (a useful autotrading plugin), they’ve unfortunately taken yet another step back.

This is another victory for MT4 based brokers. Don’t get me wrong, I do like Metatrader, but competition makes for a healthy market.