MQL4 and MQL5 Programming Articles

Successful and comfortable trading using MT4 platform without detailed market analysis - is it possible? Can such trading be implemented in practice? I suppose, yes. Especially in terms of the automated trading!

How independent are currency quotes? Are their movements coordinated or does the movement of one currency suggest nothing of the movement of another? The article describes an effort to tackle this issue using nonlinear dynamics and fractal geometry methods.

This article develops a practical MQL5 indicator that identifies Hidden Smash Day bars by strict numeric criteria and optional confirmation on the following session. We cover detection routines, buffer registration, and plot configuration to place arrows at valid bars. The approach delivers stable, non-repainting signals for historical testing and real-time monitoring.

The article describes different ways of sending trading signals from a signal program unit of a universal Expert Advisor into the positions and orders controlling unit. It dwells on serial and parallel interfaces.

The article describes Drag Trade Library that provides functionality for visual trading. The library can easily be integrated into virtually any Expert Advisor. Your Expert Advisor can be transformed from an automat into an automated trading and information system almost effortless on your side by just adding a few lines of code.

In this article, we build an interactive tools palette in MQL5 for chart drawing, with draggable, resizable panels and theme switching. We add buttons for tools like crosshair, trendlines, lines, rectangles, Fibonacci, text, and arrows, handling mouse events for activation and instructions. This system improves trading analysis through a customizable UI, supporting real-time interactions on charts

From this article on, start creating library functionality to work with price data. Today, create an object class which will store all price data which arrived with yet another tick.

This article explains how to build an Expert Advisor (EA) that interacts with chart objects, particularly trend lines, to identify and trade breakout and reversal opportunities. You will learn how the EA confirms valid signals, manages trade frequency, and maintains consistency with user-selected strategies.

Head and Shoulders patterns are difficult to identify consistently in live market data due to noise and structural ambiguity. This article presents a structured, triangle-based MQL5 indicator that isolates pattern components, constructs the neckline, and validates formations using ATR, symmetry, and slope constraints. The system detects and draws standard and inverse patterns, assigns a quality score, and confirms breakouts with optional alerts, enabling consistent and rule-based chart analysis.

The article describes the possibilities of convenient viewing the trade history when visualizing tests. Starting from build 196, MetaTrader 4 Client Terminal offers testing visualization function. It allows controlling the Expert Advisors' testing on a brand new level. Now, the trading programmer can watch every action of his or her Expert Advisor checking its operation on history!

Dijkstra's algorithm, a classic shortest-path solution in graph theory, can optimize trading strategies by modeling market networks. Traders can use it to find the most efficient routes in the candlestick chart data.

Today we'll see how to create an Expert Advisor that simply and safely works in automatic mode. At the end of the previous article, I suggested that it would be appropriate to allow manual use of the EA, at least for a while.

The article describes a method of fast optimization using the particle swarm algorithm. It also presents the method implementation in MQL, which is ready for use both in single-threaded mode inside an Expert Advisor and in a parallel multi-threaded mode as an add-on that runs on local tester agents.

This is the must-read article for anyone wanting to improve their programming career. This article series is aimed at making you the best programmer you can possibly be, no matter how experienced you are. The discussed ideas work for MQL5 programming newbies as well as professionals.

The article deals with the ways of how to send internal messages and SMSes from an Expert Advisor to mobile phones using Skype.

The article deals with the outlook of using MQL4 for more productive work at FOREX markets.

In this article, I will implement the basic functionality for tracking standard graphical object events. I will start from a double click event on a graphical object.

In this article we will describe the process of writing a simple but a very powerful library for making the html files, will learn to adjust their displaying and will see how they can be easily implemented and used in your expert or the script.

External variables of indicators are controlled using a special window where parameters can be changed and the indicator is then run again. The obvious inconvenience of these manipulations has given rise to the need for displaying the required parameters on the screen and controlling the indicator graphically.

The article describes custom averaging functions of higher quality developed by the author: JJMASeries(), JurXSeries(), JLiteSeries(), ParMASeries(), LRMASeries(), T3Series() and MASeries(). The author considers the hot substitution of these functions in indicators using the call of the SmoothXSeries() function.

The hero of our interview Leonid Velichkovski (LeoV) has already participated in Automated Trading Championships. In 2008, his multicurrency neural network was like a bright flash in the sky, earning $110,000 in a certain moment, but eventually fell victim to its own aggressive money management. Two years ago, in his interview Leonid share his own trading experience and told us about the features of his Expert Advisor. On the eve of the ATC 2010, Leonid talks about the most common myths and misconceptions associated with neural networks.

This article introduces a fully automated MQL5 system designed to identify and trade market swings with precision. Unlike traditional fixed-bar swing indicators, this system adapts dynamically to evolving price structure—detecting swing highs and swing lows in real time to capture directional opportunities as they form.