If you have enough money in your account, you would not be playing with bucketshops or use metatrader. That's just my opinion, and seems pretty logical for anyone who trades for a living. Ideally, you would port the system to a secure platform and use an established broker, preferably in the futures.

But that's a whole other subject. I think the trick for metatrader is the keep your strategy on your computer, and don't send any TP or SL data, unless it is the "disaster" SL. Keep all the calculations and TP/SL on your system until the price is hit, then send in the market order. This is not a problem if you just trade manually.

I think all traders should be able to trade manually before moving onto automatic strategies. It will probably cut your "development" time by alot. It would be very complex to mimic what the manual trader is doing and seeing.