I've been experimenting by writing some indicators and EAs and all appears to have gone well - apart from not becoming a millionaire this week!

I've managed to run back-tests and have tried a little optimization without an issue but I am having a problem with forward testing.

I have been running one of my EAs which initially tried opening a position at 15:26:24. There was an error posted to the terminal screen and the system continued trying to open the order every few seconds until it was successful at 15:28:58.

Is this a normal situation or is it simply that I'm running on a demo account?
I downloaded MT4 directly from the MetaQuotes site and I'm logged in to their "MetaQuotes-Demo" server.

TIA

Go to Interbankfx.com and download their free demo platform. If you have your firewalls (anti-hacking) software to high, it will cause lack of communications between you and the broker. I found that to be true with the MT4 platform on my computer. Good Luck! P.S. Set your firewall to low and see if it works.