MQL4 and MQL5 Programming Articles

MQL5 gave a mass of innovations, including work with events of various types (timer events, trade events, custom events, etc.). Ability to handle events allows you to create completely new type of programs for automatic and semi-automatic trading. In this article we will consider trade events and write some code for the OnTrade() function, that will process the Trade event.

The article describes an attempt to combine theory with practice in the algorithmic trading field. Most of discussions concerning the creation of Trading Systems is connected with the use of historic bars and various indicators applied thereon. This is the most well covered field and thus we will not consider it. Bars represent a very artificial entity; therefore we will work with something closer to proto-data, namely the price ticks.

There are 6 drawing styles in MQL4 and 18 drawing styles in MQL5. Therefore, it may be worth writing an article to introduce MQL5's drawing styles. In this article, we will consider the details of drawing styles in MQL5. In addition, we will create an indicator to demonstrate how to use these drawing styles, and refine the plotting.

The article details TD points and TD lines discovered by Thomas DeMark. Their practical implementation is revealed. In addition to that, a process of writing three indicators and two Expert Advisors using the concepts of Thomas DeMark is demonstrated.

The main advantage of trading robots lies in the ability to work 24 hours a day on a remote VPS server. But sometimes it is necessary to intervene in their work, while there may be no direct access to the server. Is it possible to manage EAs remotely? The article proposes one of the options for controlling EAs via external commands.

Starting with this article, we are going to develop a functionality allowing users to trade using pending requests under certain conditions, for example, when reaching a certain time limit, exceeding a specified profit or closing a position by stop loss.

Time has been a great value throughout the history of mankind, and we strive not to waste it unnecessarily. This article will tell you how to accelerate the work of your Expert Advisor if your computer has a multi-core processor. Moreover, the implementation of the proposed method does not require the knowledge of any other languages besides MQL5.

In this article, we will create an Expert Advisor for automated entry lot calculation based on risk values. Also the Expert Advisor will be able to automatically place Take Profit with the select ratio to Stop Loss. That is, it can calculate Take Profit based on any selected ratio, such as 3 to 1, 4 to 1 or any other selected value.

A Twitter client implemented as MQL class to allow you to send tweets with photos. All you need is to include a single self contained include file and off you go to tweet all your wonderful charts and signals.

The article compares the classic MQL5 access to indicators with alternative MQL4-style methods. Several varieties of MQL4-style access to indicators are considered: with and without the indicator handles caching. Considering the indicator handles inside the MQL5 core is analyzed as well.

Following up our previous article on the currency baskets trading principles, here we are going to analyze the patterns traders can detect. We will also consider the advantages and the drawbacks of each pattern and provide some recommendations on their use. The indicators based on Williams' oscillator will be used as analysis tools.

The article considers working with account events for tracking important changes in account properties affecting the automated trading. We have already implemented some functionality for tracking account events in the previous article when developing the account object collection.

The article presents an extended study of seasonal characteristics: autocorrelation heat maps and scatter plots. The purpose of the article is to show that "market memory" is of seasonal nature, which is expressed through maximized correlation of increments of arbitrary order.

From August 1, 2014, MetaTrader 4 desktop terminals older than build 600 will no longer be supported. However, many traders still work with outdated versions and are unaware of the updated platform's features. We have put a lot of effort into development and would like to move on with traders and abandon the older builds. In this article, we will describe the advantages of the new MetaTrader 4.

This article's objective is to study profitability of algorithms with different entries into trades and exits using trailing stop. Entry types to be used are random entry and reverse entry. Stop orders to be used are trailing stop and trailing take. The article demonstrates money-making algorithms with a profitability of about 30% per annum.

The Multiline Text box control is discussed. Unlike the graphical objects of the OBJ_EDIT type, the presented version will not have restrictions on the number of input characters. It also adds the mode for turning the text box into a simple text editor, where the cursor can be moved using the mouse or keys.

By default, all objects in MQL5 are passed by reference, but there is a possibility to use the object pointers. However it's necessary to perform the pointer checking, because the object may be not initialized. In this case, the MQL5 program will be terminated with critical error and unloaded. The objects, created automatically, doesn't cause such an error, so in this sence, they are quite safe. In this article, we will try to understand the difference between the object reference and object pointer, and consider how to write secure code, that uses the pointers.

In this article, we demonstrate features of botbrains.app - a no-code platform for trading robots development. To create a trading robot you don't need to write any code - just drag and drop the necessary blocks onto the scheme, set their parameters, and establish connections between them.

This article deals with the theory and practical application of the algorithm for forecasting time series, based on support-vector method. It also proposes its implementation in MQL and provides test indicators and Expert Advisors. This technology has not been implemented in MQL yet. But first, we have to get to know math for it.

In this article, we will continue our series about designing a trading system using the most popular indicators and we will talk about the average directional index (ADX) indicator. We will learn this indicator in detail to understand it well and we will learn how we to use it through a simple strategy. By learning something deeply we can get more insights and we can use it better.

In this note we will consider a typical programming errors, that occurs while working with double numbers in MQL4 programs.

The article discusses the possibility of plotting statistical distribution histograms of market conditions with the help of the graphical memory meaning no indicator buffers and arrays are applied. Sample histograms are described in details and the "hidden" functionality of MQL5 graphical objects is shown.

The article deals with the approaches enabling accurate simulation of walk forward optimization using the built-in tester and auxiliary libraries implemented in MQL.

Any Expert Advisor developer, regardless of programming skills, is daily confronted with the same trading tasks and algorithmic problems, which should be solved to organize a reliable trading process. The article describes the possibilities of the CStrategy trading engine that can undertake the solution of these tasks and provide a user with convenient mechanism for describing a custom trading idea.

This article focuses on general issues linked to handling software errors. Furthermore, the logging term is brought up and the examples of logging implementation with MQL5 tools are shown.

This article presents Pivot Mean Oscillator (PMO), an implementation of the cumulative moving average (CMA) as a trading indicator for the MetaTrader platforms. In particular, we first introduce Pivot Mean (PM) as a normalization index for timeseries that computes the fraction between any data point and the CMA. We then build PMO as the difference between the moving averages applied to two PM signals. Some preliminary experiments carried out on the EURUSD symbol to test the efficacy of the proposed indicator are also reported, leaving ample space for further considerations and improvements.

This article describes a new approach to hedging of positions and draws the line in the debates between users of MetaTrader 4 and MetaTrader 5 about this matter. The algorithms making such hedging reliable are described in layman's terms and illustrated with simple charts and diagrams. This article is dedicated to the new panel HedgeTerminal, which is essentially a fully featured trading terminal within MetaTrader 5. Using HedgeTerminal and the virtualization of the trade it offers, positions can be managed in the way similar to MetaTrader 4.

The article develops the ideas proposed in the previous part and considers them further. It describes the problems of yield distributions, plotting and studying statistical regularities.

In this article, we will create the class of a symbol object that is to be the basic object for creating the symbol collection. The class will allow us to obtain data on the necessary symbols for their further analysis and comparison.

This article discusses the implementation of various methods of time filtering a cross-platform expert advisor. The time filter classes are responsible for checking whether or not a given time falls under a certain time configuration setting.

This article discusses the CSignal and CSignals classes which will be used in cross-platform expert advisors. It examines the differences between MQL4 and MQL5 on how particular data needed for evaluation of trade signals are accessed to ensure that the code written will be compatible with both compilers.

This article is intended for developers who would be interested in using SQL in their projects. It explains the functionality and advantages of SQLite. The article does not require special knowledge of SQLite functions, yet minimum understanding of SQL would be beneficial.

In this article, we continue studying the use of CAppDialog. Now we will learn how to set color for the background, borders and header of the dialog box. Also, this article provides a step-by-step description of how to add transparency for an application window when dragging it within the chart. We will consider how to create child classes of CAppDialog or CWndClient and analyze new specifics of working with controls. Finally, we will review new Projects from a new perspective.