MQL4 and MQL5 Programming Articles

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Study the MQL5 language for programming trading strategies in numerous published articles mostly written by you - the community members. The articles are grouped into categories to help you quicker find answers to any questions related to programming: Integration, Tester, Trading Strategies, etc.

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Expert Advisors Based on Popular Trading Systems and Alchemy of Trading Robot Optimization (Part VII)
Expert Advisors Based on Popular Trading Systems and Alchemy of Trading Robot Optimization (Part VII)

Expert Advisors Based on Popular Trading Systems and Alchemy of Trading Robot Optimization (Part VII)

In this article, the author gives an example Expert Advisor meeting the requirements stated in the Rules of the Automated Trading Championship 2008
A Non-Trading EA Testing Indicators
A Non-Trading EA Testing Indicators

A Non-Trading EA Testing Indicators

All indicators can be divided into two groups: static indicators, the displaying of which, once shown, always remains the same in history and does not change with new incoming quotes, and dynamic indicators that display their status for the current moment only and are fully redrawn when a new price comes. The efficiency of a static indicator is directly visible on the chart. But how can we check whether a dynamic indicator works ok? This is the question the article is devoted to.
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Introduction to MQL5 (Part 20): Introduction to Harmonic Patterns

Introduction to MQL5 (Part 20): Introduction to Harmonic Patterns

In this article, we explore the fundamentals of harmonic patterns, their structures, and how they are applied in trading. You’ll learn about Fibonacci retracements, extensions, and how to implement harmonic pattern detection in MQL5, setting the foundation for building advanced trading tools and Expert Advisors.
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Building a Liquidity Spectrum Volume Profile Indicator in MQL5

Building a Liquidity Spectrum Volume Profile Indicator in MQL5

Build a Liquidity Spectrum Volume Profile in MQL5 that allocates volume to equal price bins over a chosen lookback using candle close prices. The guide covers data retrieval with copy functions, binning and normalization, and drawing rectangles and POC lines with chart objects and time offsets to reveal high-activity liquidity zones on the chart.
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Predicting Renko Bars with CatBoost AI

Predicting Renko Bars with CatBoost AI

How to use Renko bars with AI? Let's look at Renko trading on Forex with forecast accuracy of up to 59.27%. We will explore the benefits of Renko bars for filtering market noise, learn why volume is more important than price patterns, and how to set the optimal Renko block size for EURUSD. This is a step-by-step guide on integrating CatBoost, Python, and MetaTrader 5 to create your own Renko Forex forecasting system. It is ideal for traders looking to go beyond traditional technical analysis.
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Price Action Analysis Toolkit Development (Part 2):  Analytical Comment Script

Price Action Analysis Toolkit Development (Part 2): Analytical Comment Script

Aligned with our vision of simplifying price action, we are pleased to introduce another tool that can significantly enhance your market analysis and help you make well-informed decisions. This tool displays key technical indicators such as previous day's prices, significant support and resistance levels, and trading volume, while automatically generating visual cues on the chart.
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Deconstructing examples of trading strategies in the client terminal

Deconstructing examples of trading strategies in the client terminal

The article uses block diagrams to examine the logic of the candlestick-based training EAs located in the Experts\Free Robots folder of the terminal.
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How to view deals directly on the chart without weltering in trading history

How to view deals directly on the chart without weltering in trading history

In this article, we will create a simple tool for convenient viewing of positions and deals directly on the chart with key navigation. This will allow traders to visually examine individual deals and receive all the information about trading results right on the spot.
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Category Theory in MQL5 (Part 8): Monoids

Category Theory in MQL5 (Part 8): Monoids

This article continues the series on category theory implementation in MQL5. Here we introduce monoids as domain (set) that sets category theory apart from other data classification methods by including rules and an identity element.
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Building an Internal and External Market Structure Indicator

Building an Internal and External Market Structure Indicator

The article presents a structured approach to external and internal market structure in MQL5, from swing identification to CHoCH/BoS validation within an established trend. It explains refining true highs/lows, enforcing “first internal signal” logic, and rendering lines, labels, and markers on the chart. The outcome is a consistent indicator that converts price structure into defined entries, stop losses, and 1.5R targets.
Interview with Evgeny Gnidko (ATC 2012)
Interview with Evgeny Gnidko (ATC 2012)

Interview with Evgeny Gnidko (ATC 2012)

The Expert Advisor of Evgeny Gnidko (FIFO) currently seems to be the most stable one at the Automated Trading Championship 2012. This trading robot entered TOP-10 at the third week remaining one of the leading Expert Advisors ever since.
Tomasz Tauzowski:"All I can do is pray for a loss position" (ATC 2010)
Tomasz Tauzowski:"All I can do is pray for a loss position" (ATC 2010)

Tomasz Tauzowski:"All I can do is pray for a loss position" (ATC 2010)

Tomasz Tauzowski (ttauzo) is a long-standing member of the top ten on the Automated Trading Championship 2010. For the seventh week his Expert Advisor is between the fifth and the seventh places. And no wonder: according to the report of the current Championship leader Boris Odinstov, ttauzo is one of the most stable EAs participating in the competition.
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Developing Trading Strategies with the Parafrac and Parafrac V2 Oscillators: Single Entry Performance Insights

Developing Trading Strategies with the Parafrac and Parafrac V2 Oscillators: Single Entry Performance Insights

This article introduces the ParaFrac Oscillator and its V2 model as trading tools. It outlines three trading strategies developed using these indicators. Each strategy was tested and optimized to identify their strengths and weaknesses. Comparative analysis highlighted the performance differences between the original and V2 models.
Interview with Li Fang (ATC 2011)
Interview with Li Fang (ATC 2011)

Interview with Li Fang (ATC 2011)

On the seventh week of the Championship, Li Fang's Expert Advisor (lf8749) set a new record - it earned over $100,000 in 10 trades. This successful series helped the Expert Advisor to stay at the very top of the Automated Trading Championship 2011 rating for two weeks. In this interview we tried to find out the secret of Li Fang's success.
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Price Action Analysis Toolkit Development (Part 20): External Flow (IV) — Correlation Pathfinder

Price Action Analysis Toolkit Development (Part 20): External Flow (IV) — Correlation Pathfinder

Correlation Pathfinder offers a fresh approach to understanding currency pair dynamics as part of the Price Action Analysis Toolkit Development Series. This tool automates data collection and analysis, providing insight into how pairs like EUR/USD and GBP/USD interact. Enhance your trading strategy with practical, real-time information that helps you manage risk and spot opportunities more effectively.
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Developing a Replay System (Part 53): Things Get Complicated (V)

Developing a Replay System (Part 53): Things Get Complicated (V)

In this article, we'll cover an important topic that few people understand: Custom Events. Dangers. Advantages and disadvantages of these elements. This topic is key for those who want to become a professional programmer in MQL5 or any other language. Here we will focus on MQL5 and MetaTrader 5.
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Neural networks made easy (Part 58): Decision Transformer (DT)

Neural networks made easy (Part 58): Decision Transformer (DT)

We continue to explore reinforcement learning methods. In this article, I will focus on a slightly different algorithm that considers the Agent’s policy in the paradigm of constructing a sequence of actions.
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Graphics in DoEasy library (Part 98): Moving pivot points of extended standard graphical objects

Graphics in DoEasy library (Part 98): Moving pivot points of extended standard graphical objects

In the article, I continue the development of extended standard graphical objects and create the functionality for moving pivot points of composite graphical objects using the control points for managing the coordinates of the graphical object pivot points.
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Data Science and Machine Learning (Part 25): Forex Timeseries Forecasting Using a Recurrent Neural Network (RNN)

Data Science and Machine Learning (Part 25): Forex Timeseries Forecasting Using a Recurrent Neural Network (RNN)

Recurrent neural networks (RNNs) excel at leveraging past information to predict future events. Their remarkable predictive capabilities have been applied across various domains with great success. In this article, we will deploy RNN models to predict trends in the forex market, demonstrating their potential to enhance forecasting accuracy in forex trading.
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MetaTrader Meets Google Sheets with Pythonanywhere: A Guide to Secure Data Flow

MetaTrader Meets Google Sheets with Pythonanywhere: A Guide to Secure Data Flow

This article demonstrates a secure way to export MetaTrader data to Google Sheets. Google Sheet is the most valuable solution as it is cloud based and the data saved in there can be accessed anytime and from anywhere. So traders can access trading and related data exported to google sheet and do further analysis for future trading anytime and wherever they are at the moment.
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Neural networks made easy (Part 23): Building a tool for Transfer Learning

Neural networks made easy (Part 23): Building a tool for Transfer Learning

In this series of articles, we have already mentioned Transfer Learning more than once. However, this was only mentioning. in this article, I suggest filling this gap and taking a closer look at Transfer Learning.
Outline of MetaTrader Market (Infographics)
Outline of MetaTrader Market (Infographics)

Outline of MetaTrader Market (Infographics)

A few weeks ago we published the infographic on Freelance service. We also promised to reveal some statistics of the MetaTrader Market. Now, we invite you to examine the data we have gathered.
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DoEasy. Controls (Part 26): Finalizing the ToolTip WinForms object and moving on to ProgressBar development

DoEasy. Controls (Part 26): Finalizing the ToolTip WinForms object and moving on to ProgressBar development

In this article, I will complete the development of the ToolTip control and start the development of the ProgressBar WinForms object. While working on objects, I will develop universal functionality for animating controls and their components.
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Finding custom currency pair patterns in Python using MetaTrader 5

Finding custom currency pair patterns in Python using MetaTrader 5

Are there any repeating patterns and regularities in the Forex market? I decided to create my own pattern analysis system using Python and MetaTrader 5. A kind of symbiosis of math and programming for conquering Forex.
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Developing a multi-currency Expert Advisor (Part 12): Developing prop trading level risk manager

Developing a multi-currency Expert Advisor (Part 12): Developing prop trading level risk manager

In the EA being developed, we already have a certain mechanism for controlling drawdown. But it is probabilistic in nature, as it is based on the results of testing on historical price data. Therefore, the drawdown can sometimes exceed the maximum expected values (although with a small probability). Let's try to add a mechanism that ensures guaranteed compliance with the specified drawdown level.
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Neural Networks Made Easy (Part 88): Time-Series Dense Encoder (TiDE)

Neural Networks Made Easy (Part 88): Time-Series Dense Encoder (TiDE)

In an attempt to obtain the most accurate forecasts, researchers often complicate forecasting models. Which in turn leads to increased model training and maintenance costs. Is such an increase always justified? This article introduces an algorithm that uses the simplicity and speed of linear models and demonstrates results on par with the best models with a more complex architecture.
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Developing a multi-currency Expert Advisor (Part 2): Transition to virtual positions of trading strategies

Developing a multi-currency Expert Advisor (Part 2): Transition to virtual positions of trading strategies

Let's continue developing a multi-currency EA with several strategies working in parallel. Let's try to move all the work associated with opening market positions from the strategy level to the level of the EA managing the strategies. The strategies themselves will trade only virtually, without opening market positions.
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Integrate Your Own LLM into EA (Part 2): Example of Environment Deployment

Integrate Your Own LLM into EA (Part 2): Example of Environment Deployment

With the rapid development of artificial intelligence today, language models (LLMs) are an important part of artificial intelligence, so we should think about how to integrate powerful LLMs into our algorithmic trading. For most people, it is difficult to fine-tune these powerful models according to their needs, deploy them locally, and then apply them to algorithmic trading. This series of articles will take a step-by-step approach to achieve this goal.
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MQL5 Trading Toolkit (Part 8): How to Implement and Use the History Manager EX5 Library in Your Codebase

MQL5 Trading Toolkit (Part 8): How to Implement and Use the History Manager EX5 Library in Your Codebase

Discover how to effortlessly import and utilize the History Manager EX5 library in your MQL5 source code to process trade histories in your MetaTrader 5 account in this series' final article. With simple one-line function calls in MQL5, you can efficiently manage and analyze your trading data. Additionally, you will learn how to create different trade history analytics scripts and develop a price-based Expert Advisor as practical use-case examples. The example EA leverages price data and the History Manager EX5 library to make informed trading decisions, adjust trade volumes, and implement recovery strategies based on previously closed trades.
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Data Science and ML(Part 30): The Power Couple for Predicting the Stock Market, Convolutional Neural Networks(CNNs) and Recurrent Neural Networks(RNNs)

Data Science and ML(Part 30): The Power Couple for Predicting the Stock Market, Convolutional Neural Networks(CNNs) and Recurrent Neural Networks(RNNs)

In this article, We explore the dynamic integration of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) in stock market prediction. By leveraging CNNs' ability to extract patterns and RNNs' proficiency in handling sequential data. Let us see how this powerful combination can enhance the accuracy and efficiency of trading algorithms.
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Neural networks made easy (Part 73): AutoBots for predicting price movements

Neural networks made easy (Part 73): AutoBots for predicting price movements

We continue to discuss algorithms for training trajectory prediction models. In this article, we will get acquainted with a method called "AutoBots".
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MQL5 Trading Toolkit (Part 1): Developing A Positions Management EX5 Library

MQL5 Trading Toolkit (Part 1): Developing A Positions Management EX5 Library

Learn how to create a developer's toolkit for managing various position operations with MQL5. In this article, I will demonstrate how to create a library of functions (ex5) that will perform simple to advanced position management operations, including automatic handling and reporting of the different errors that arise when dealing with position management tasks with MQL5.
Considering Orders in a Large Program
Considering Orders in a Large Program

Considering Orders in a Large Program

General principles of considering orders in a large and complex program are discussed.
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Market Simulation (Part 18): First Steps with SQL (I)

Market Simulation (Part 18): First Steps with SQL (I)

It doesn't matter which SQL program we use: MySQL, SQL Server, SQLite, OpenSQL, or another. They all have something in common, and the common element is the SQL language. Even if we do not intend to use Workbench, we can manipulate or work with the database directly in MetaEditor or through MQL5 to perform actions in MetaTrader 5, but to do so, you will need knowledge of SQL. So here, we will learn at least the basics.
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Benefiting from Forex market seasonality

Benefiting from Forex market seasonality

We are all familiar with the concept of seasonality, for example, we are all accustomed to rising prices for fresh vegetables in winter or rising fuel prices during severe frosts, but few people know that similar patterns exist in the Forex market.
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Data label for timeseries mining (Part 2):Make datasets with trend markers using Python

Data label for timeseries mining (Part 2):Make datasets with trend markers using Python

This series of articles introduces several time series labeling methods, which can create data that meets most artificial intelligence models, and targeted data labeling according to needs can make the trained artificial intelligence model more in line with the expected design, improve the accuracy of our model, and even help the model make a qualitative leap!
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Data Science and ML (Part 42): Forex Time series Forecasting using ARIMA in Python, Everything you need to Know

Data Science and ML (Part 42): Forex Time series Forecasting using ARIMA in Python, Everything you need to Know

ARIMA, short for Auto Regressive Integrated Moving Average, is a powerful traditional time series forecasting model. With the ability to detect spikes and fluctuations in a time series data, this model can make accurate predictions on the next values. In this article, we are going to understand what is it, how it operates, what you can do with it when it comes to predicting the next prices in the market with high accuracy and much more.
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Self Optimizing Expert Advisors in MQL5 (Part 17): Ensemble Intelligence

Self Optimizing Expert Advisors in MQL5 (Part 17): Ensemble Intelligence

All algorithmic trading strategies are difficult to set up and maintain, regardless of complexity—a challenge shared by beginners and experts alike. This article introduces an ensemble framework where supervised models and human intuition work together to overcome their shared limitations. By aligning a moving average channel strategy with a Ridge Regression model on the same indicators, we achieve centralized control, faster self-correction, and profitability from otherwise unprofitable systems.
A Trader's Assistant Based on Extended MACD Analysis
A Trader's Assistant Based on Extended MACD Analysis

A Trader's Assistant Based on Extended MACD Analysis

Script 'Trader's Assistant' helps you to make a decision on opening positions, based on the extended analysis of the MACD status for the last three bars in the real-time trading on any timeframe. It can also be used for back testing.
Object Approach in MQL
Object Approach in MQL

Object Approach in MQL

This article will be interesting first of all for programmers both beginners and professionals working in MQL environment. Also it would be useful if this article were read by MQL environment developers and ideologists, because questions that are analyzed here may become projects for future implementation of MetaTrader and MQL.