As you may or may not have noticed, the whole tick data section of eareview.net has changed dramatically during the past month. It is now divided in separate HOWTOs for each different task and it also includes guides that go through the process of downloading free tick data from some more brokers such as Pepperstone/Integral or MB Trading. The new format should hopefully be much easier to browse and comprehend. Special sections were created for the Downloads as well as for FAQ & Troubleshooting.

The FXT processing scripts have also received a lot of my attention. They were merged into a single script – suggestively named CSV2FXT – which can automatically identify the date format used in your CSV file as well as the input data format, which makes it able to parse the data without a lot of configuration effort on the users’ part. In addition, it is now possible to generate FXT files for multiple timeframes at once and a neat progress indicator is displayed on the chart.

In other news, after 6 weeks of beta testing, the rather long-awaited Tick Data Suite has also been released and is now available for purchase. A full-featured trial is also available: to request such a serial number, fill in the Tick Data Suite trial form and you will receive one via email. I would like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who participated in the beta program – your contributions were very valuable and they helped make Tick Data Suite a better product!

For those who have no idea what the Tick Data Suite is, I will make a brief sum-up: it’s a loader (not a script) that starts the Metatrader 4 client with support for tick data backtesting and optimization, variable (real) spread auto-detection, 3rd party tools compatibility and with the capability to launch multiple Metatrader 4 instances from the same folder, all of the above with a single click and no manual configuration at all. Naturally, full technical support and updates are available.

Technical support for the Birt’s patch script is now completely discontinued, however the new FAQ & Troubleshooting page should cover all the problems one may encounter when using it.

Finally, for those who did not notice yet, eareview.net now has a stronger social networking presence: in addition to the Twitter eareview feed that gets automatically updated with new posts, there is now a Facebook eareview page and a Google+ eareview page. You can now keep up with the stuff posted and updated on eareview using either of the above or simply by subscribing to the RSS feed or to the mailing list by using the form on the right.