Trade Pause Scheduler
- Utilities
- Version: 1.0
- Activations: 10
Trade Pause Scheduler keeps your account out of the hours you would rather sit out.
You choose the windows. During a window it cancels pending orders that get placed and closes positions that get opened. When the window ends, everything goes back to normal.
It does not open trades, it does not choose entries, and it does not send signals.
CHOOSE THE WINDOWS
By economic release: pick the importance (high only, high and medium, or all) and the countries you care about, then say how many minutes before and after a release the pause should run.
By day and time: up to three windows, written the way you would say them — Mon-Fri 06:00-08:00, Mon,Wed,Fri 09:30-10:15, All 12:00-12:30, or Fri 23:00-01:00 for a window that ends the next day. At start-up the log prints how each line was read, so a typo shows itself instead of sitting there silently.
By hand: press Pause now for an immediate pause, and Resume to end it. If you press Resume inside a scheduled window, that window will not pause you again.
WHAT HAPPENS DURING A WINDOW
Pending orders placed during the window are cancelled. Positions opened during the window are closed. Positions you were already holding when the window began are left alone — this is a tool for not starting something in the middle of a release, not one that liquidates what you have.
Point it at one Expert Advisor with the magic number filter, or leave it at zero to act on everything on the account, including your own manual trades.
YOU CAN SEE IT ON THE CHART
The panel shows the state, the time the next window starts, the reason for it, the releases that are coming, and how many trades have been closed in the current window. Drag the panel anywhere and fold it to a single line; the position and the folded state are still there the next time the terminal starts.
Pause windows are shaded on the time axis, and while a pause is running there is a red bar across the top of the chart. That bar matters more than it sounds: one of the common uses is the Monday open, and at the weekend no candles are drawn, so anything tied to the time axis would sit far off the right edge where you would never see it.
Alerts on start and end can be a popup, a push notification to the mobile terminal, a sound, or none of them.
IT TELLS YOU WHEN YOUR SETTINGS ARE TOO WIDE
If the filter you chose would pause more than a quarter of the coming week, the panel says so and the log prints the numbers: how many windows, how many hours, what share of the period. Unknown country codes are reported rather than dropped in silence. A magic number that keeps opening trades inside a window is reported too, once, so you know where the repeated closes are coming from.
WHAT IT DOES NOT DO
- It cannot stop an order from being opened. MetaTrader 5 has no interface for that and MQL5 Market does not allow DLLs, so the tool closes the position right after it opens. The spread and any price movement in between are a real cost.
- If your EA keeps re-entering inside a window, that cost is paid on every attempt. There is no cap on the number of closes, because a cap would mean the tool going quiet halfway through a window.
- It cannot do anything while algo trading is off in the terminal. It says so at start-up and while it runs.
- News windows need the terminal's economic calendar, which is a live-account feature. In the Strategy Tester the calendar cannot be reached at all, so news pausing is inactive there. Day and time windows still run.
- With the magic filter at zero it acts on everything, including trades you opened by hand.
- It does not touch positions that were already open when a window began.
- One chart per terminal. MetaTrader 5 runs one Expert Advisor per chart, so give it a chart of its own, and a second copy will refuse to start so nothing gets closed twice.
- Release names are shown in your terminal's language, because that is how the platform supplies them.
TRYING IT IN THE STRATEGY TESTER
The free demo runs in the Strategy Tester, where the economic calendar is not available. Use a day/time window instead:
1. Set Pause during economic-news windows to false.
2. Put a window that the test period will reach into Day/time window 1, for example All 09:00-12:00.
3. Run the test in visual mode.
4. At the start time the panel switches to Paused and the red bar appears across the top of the chart. At the end time it goes back to Active.
5. The log prints Pause window started and Pause window ended, and the line showing how your window was read.
Please note that the tester runs only one Expert Advisor and gives you no way to place an order by hand, so there is nothing there for the tool to cancel or close. What the tester shows you is the scheduling: the windows, the panel and the chart marks. The cancelling and closing run on a live or demo account.
NO EXTERNAL DEPENDENCIES
No DLL, no external website or API, no third-party server, no extra files to install, and nothing is collected from your terminal. Everything runs inside MetaTrader 5.
SETTINGS
Seventeen inputs, all with defaults that work as they are. Nothing has to be configured before the first run.
PLEASE NOTE
Trading foreign exchange and CFDs carries a risk of loss. This tool pauses and resumes trading activity at the times you set. It does not provide trading advice or signals and makes no claim about trading results. All trading decisions and their outcomes are your own.
