What's the best API for automated forex trading?

Question

I am interested in writing a small automatic trader for the forex market. I would like to chose my own tools (platform and programming language) and I just need to find a decent API to query the numbers and that accepts requests for trading actions. I guess the ideal would be some web service with a XML API, or similar.

Any ideas?

Solution 1

Check out the InteractiveBrokers API or the Cunningham T4 API. Both are really good, although I'm not exactly sure T4 allows forex trading.

Solution 2

MT4 is the industry standard. It allows simple interface through .dll files and has an extensive support base.

Comments

[Christopher Thomas]

except it's a desktop client, that won't work if you want to run an online system I suppose

[Luke]

DLL files are compatible with .net so you can run them on a .net webserver.

[Mike Furlender]

There are a hundred ways to run it on/through a webserver. As I said, MT4 allows interface through dll files. That means you can interface with it through anything capable of interfacing with dll files (IIS, Apache, etc) . Additionally, you can use the Windows Desktop App API functions, (ex. msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/…). Since you can run MT4 on Linux through Wine, this means that you can run it through a Linux-based webserver too. There are lots of other ways. Look up MT4-web bridge.