Spread Monitoring System MT4

Spread Monitoring System

BRIEF DESCRIPTION
A spread monitoring and analysis panel that records spread data per minute, stores it without a time limit, and shows when a symbol is cheap or expensive to trade.

OVERVIEW
Spread is a real trading cost, and it is not constant. It widens around news releases, at rollover, during low-liquidity hours, and it varies by broker. Most traders only see the current spread number in the Market Watch window, with no record of how it behaved five minutes ago, last Friday at the open of the London session, or during the last major news release.

Spread Monitoring System measures the spread on every incoming quote, in pips, and groups the readings into one-minute bars with their minimum, maximum and average value. Every bar is written to a file, so the history keeps growing for as long as the indicator is attached, with no fixed limit on how far back it goes. The panel displays this data as a live readout, a set of statistics, a scrollable graph, and an hour-by-weekday cost map that shows the cheapest and most expensive times to trade.

This is the MetaTrader 4 counterpart of Spread Monitoring System for MetaTrader 5, built to the same design and file format. The indicator does not place, modify or close any orders. It only reads spread data and displays it.

HOW IT WORKS
Every incoming quote is measured and added to the bar for the current minute. When the minute closes, the bar is stored in memory and appended to a history file on disk, so the collected data survives a terminal restart or a recompile. There is no fixed limit on how long the history can grow; a retention limit can optionally be set in the settings.

KEY FEATURES

Live spread readout
The current spread is shown in large digits and changes color depending on how far it is from its recent moving average, so an expensive moment is visible immediately.

Full-history statistics
Minimum, maximum, average, median and 95th-percentile spread are calculated across the entire stored history, not just the visible chart window. The median and the 95th-percentile value describe the typical and the realistic worst-case cost far better than a single maximum figure taken from one news spike.

Unlimited persistent history
Spread history is written to disk continuously and reloaded automatically the next time the indicator is attached. There is no need to keep the terminal running non-stop to preserve months of collected data.

Aggregating history graph
The graph always fits the entire stored history into the panel width, whether that history covers a few hours or several months, by combining several one-minute bars into a single column once the timeframe grows past what the panel can show at full resolution. A short recent period is still shown one bar at a time.

Hour-by-weekday cost map
A second view groups the recorded history by hour of day and day of the week and colors each cell from cheap (green) to expensive (red), based on server time. This shows which trading hours are consistently cheap or expensive for a given symbol and broker.

History Analyzer
A second, read-only mode that displays statistics, the graph and the cost map for a specific date range chosen by the user, instead of the live feed, using the history already saved to disk. This mode does not record any data and can run at the same time as a normal monitoring instance on the same symbol, on the same or a different chart.

Multi-symbol monitoring
A single indicator instance can track several symbols at once from one chart, with a row of clickable tabs to switch between them. Each symbol keeps its own independent history and its own file on disk.

Spread-spike alerts
An optional terminal alert (and, if enabled, a push notification to the mobile app) is triggered when the spread reaches a chosen threshold, with a cooldown period to avoid repeated alerts for the same event.

Adjustable display
The panel scales automatically to the screen's display scaling setting so the text stays sharp on high-resolution monitors, and its position, height, fonts, colors and opacity can all be adjusted in the settings.

READING THE PANEL
NOW is the current spread. CANDLE shows the minimum, maximum and average spread measured so far in the current, still-forming one-minute bar. HIST shows the same statistics, plus the median and the 95th-percentile value, calculated across the entire stored history. MA(period) shows the moving average of the last several bars, smoothing out minute-to-minute noise. A full explanation of every value shown on the panel is provided in the separate guide referenced below.

MAIN SETTINGS
Symbols: monitor the chart symbol only, or a list of several symbols at once.
Data: how much history to keep, whether to save it to disk, and whether to load previously saved history or start fresh.
History Analyzer: turns the instance into the read-only, custom date range viewer described above.
Moving average: the number of bars used for the smoothed MA row.
Alerts: the spread threshold, the minimum time between alerts, and whether to also send a push notification.
Layout and style: panel position and size, display scale, fonts, colors and transparency.

DIFFERENCES FROM THE METATRADER 5 VERSION
MetaTrader 4 does not give an indicator access to the broker's historical tick data, so two capabilities available on MetaTrader 5 are not present here:

There is no history backfill on first attach. On MetaTrader 5, the indicator can fill in the recent days automatically from the broker's stored ticks; on MetaTrader 4, recorded history begins from the moment the indicator is first attached and only grows while it keeps running.

The current spread is sampled by reading the latest quote at short, regular intervals and on every incoming price change, rather than reading every single tick the broker sends, because MetaTrader 4 does not expose a full tick history stream to indicators. In practice this captures effectively every quote change under normal market conditions; during an extremely fast burst of prices, an isolated quote between two samples could be missed. Average spread and the hour-by-weekday cost map are not meaningfully affected by this.

The History Analyzer can only read from the data already saved to disk. On MetaTrader 5, it can additionally pull an arbitrary past date range straight from the broker's tick history; on MetaTrader 4 it is limited to whatever the indicator has actually recorded, since no other source of historical spread data exists on this platform.

Everything else, including the panel layout, the graph, the cost map, persistent storage, multi-symbol monitoring, alerts, and the on-disk history file format, is the same on both platforms. A history file recorded on one platform can be read by the other for the same broker account.

RECOMMENDATIONS
Attach one monitoring instance per symbol per trading account; two instances writing to the same symbol's history at the same time are not needed and are not supported. A separate History Analyzer instance can safely be attached to review a date range at the same time as a monitoring instance is running. Leaving the indicator attached and running continuously, ideally on a machine that stays on, produces the most useful long-term history.

A full step-by-step guide covering every setting, every value shown on the panel, and how the History Analyzer works is available here: Full Guide