Many of the Forex brokers e.g. FXCM and Alpari UK are now offering direct trading through MetaTrader which offers great opportunities to program ‘Expert Advisors’ to automate your trading. This means that you can be day trading full time whilst you’re at work and asleep.

Unfortunately MetaTrader is a purely Windows application but the great news is that it installs and runs fine under Wine on Ubuntu 9.04. It will install under vanilla Wine from the Ubuntu repository but unfortunately it won’t run because it requires MFC libraries that aren’t included in the default Wine installation.

This is easily remedied by copying the following files from a Windows XP box :-

-rwxrwxrwx 1 andrew andrew 924432 2003-07-16 17:28 mfc40.dll
-rwxrwxrwx 1 andrew andrew 927504 2008-04-14 01:11 mfc40u.dll
-rwxrwxrwx 1 andrew andrew 1028096 2008-04-14 01:11 mfc42.dll
-rwxrwxrwx 1 andrew andrew 981760 2007-04-03 04:14 mfc42u.dll
-rwxrwxrwx 1 andrew andrew 1060864 2003-03-18 20:20 mfc71.dll
-rwxrwxrwx 1 andrew andrew 1047552 2003-03-18 20:12 mfc71u.dll
-rwxrwxrwx 1 andrew andrew 22528 2008-04-14 01:11 mfcsubs.dll

to your .wine/dosdevices/c:/windows/system32 directory.