MT4 EA: Stupid Programming Mistakes

Tuesday, April 28, 2009

Well, I spent last evening tracking down some problems in my next foray into programming expert advisers.It turns our that a simple logical test was using an '&' instead of an '&&' between two terms.This little horseshoe nail caused some position closing attempts to fail with an error 138 -- meaning that the price being used to close the position was too far away from the market price.I also ran

MT4 EA: Moving Towards Sustainability

Monday, April 27, 2009

Yesterday's experiments with creating an expert advisor to scalp the 5 minute chart show great profits and great risk.I've been working to reduce the level of risk without taking away the reasonable chance of making reasonable profits.Here is the most recent chart:This is running from 01-Feb-2009 to 25-Apr-2009 and obviously surviving any ups and downs during that period.I'm still not happy with

MT4 EA: Aggresive 5 Minute Scalper

Sunday, April 26, 2009

Well, it's the weekend, what else is a grown man to do?I had an inspiration for an (overly) aggressive expert advisor today. Basically, it's a simple buy low and sell high machine using oscillators.Scope out the chart. It does fairly well for a period of time and then when the market finds it's achilles heel it is undone.All is not lost. I have some ideas for improving the aggression factor as

Sample MQ4 Code

Saturday, March 7, 2009

Here is a bit of code that demonstrates what I've been blogging about. It's a simple way to manage pending position requests. The idea is that a signal his been raised but that this code will let you wait for an improvement in the price before actually opening a position.// *******************************************************************// Name: AMS_PEND.MQ4// Date: 01-Mar-2009// Prog: Rookie

Expert Adviser Weekend

Finally, the weekend is almost here. I've been stealing a few moments here and there during the week but it's not that productive.Basically, I've limited myself to testing various "opening" strategies. What I've found is that I can increase earnings across the test set -- but generally at the expense of a bigger draw down. I'd like to come up with a system that tests out a tripling of the

EA Development by Component

Wednesday, March 4, 2009

Okay, I've got a few EA components under my belt now.First, I've made myself a trivial system to determine potential entry points. Basically, this system raises a signal when the price is above or below a moving average for some period of time and then crosses over. Remember, I'm only concerned about making an easy to manage framework at this point.Second, signals raised above are tossed into a

EA Development

Monday, March 2, 2009

I was able to put some serious effort into developing an expert adviser over the weekend. At this stage I believe I can build something that will be both relatively safe and profitable. This is not an easy task!Anyway, I do want to assure you that I have no intention of ever selling an EA. If it works I'll use it for myself. If it doesn't work, then I'd have nothing worth selling in any case.

Programming An EA

Thursday, February 26, 2009

I'm finding it takes a lot more time to program an EA than I would expect. Alternately, perhaps I am dumb enough to think that I could just throw together some ideas and have a profit machine?Anyway, after another night of testing I have some new software that is able to detect or indicate various conditions.I'm hoping that doing enough visual testing will clue me in enough, personally, to the

MT4 - Moving Average Crossover

Believe it or not I think I'm going to use a simple moving average crossover as a signal for my automated trading system.Obviously, and testing verifies this, there are two issues to manage:1) Getting whipsawed.2) Entering the trend too late.I believe that I can at least alleviate these issues somewhat. Technical indicators can provide clues about whether or not the market is currently trending

Ongoing MT4 Development

Wednesday, February 25, 2009

As I develop and test more expert advisers I see just how tricky it is to translate common sense into a series of hard and fast rules.In short, my adviser does stupid things!When I trade Forex on my own I'll combine a "feel" for the current situation along with some technical indicators. For example, in recent times, if something funny is going on, then the market I'm trading almost always takes

MT4 Programming

Monday, February 23, 2009

I love the fact that I can program the MT4 system. However, wouldn't it be nice if there was documentation in English? Well, yes, there is some, but it obviously wasn't written by somebody who speaks it fluently.Anyway, I spent much of the weekend fooling around with some custom expert advisers. One or two had promise, but obviously if it was easy to do then everyone would be doing it. It

Automated Forex Trading Robot

Thursday, February 19, 2009

I've signed up for a second account. This one is at a broker that uses a dealing desk and an MT4 based trading platform.Why?Because I write software for a living. Because I sometimes have a decided lack of discipline. Because my life is stressful and I don't need to be glued to my screen worrying about charts, margins and limits.No, really, it's because I'd like to think that I can create a