im not totally familiar with all of this, but i was thinking...

i know there are a number of us who want to use metatrader (a great platform) as a charting tool for our brokers (who have crappy platforms) data feed.

for example, there is a way to access Interactive Brokers data feed, but no way known to pump it into metatrader. im sure it is possible, but we dont know the format of the metatrader data.

so this is my question for the more advanced computer guys out there

how would we go about writing a snooping application to look at the protocol between metatrader and its server? if we find this out, then its easy to wriet a simple server app to read in data from your own broker and spit it out in metatrder format