Items Tagged With metatrader

MetaQuotes Software dropped me an email today to let me know that they are having an automated trading championship starting October 1st.  The main objective of this Championship is to raise the popularity of Automated Trading.  If you are interested in programming custom experts in Metatrader, this is for you.  I am thinking about creating an expert so I can participate. 

Your expert will trade automatically with fake money and at the end of 3 months, the expert that has the most profit wins the following:

1st prize: $40,000

2nd prize:$25,000

3rd prize: $15,000

This is not a bad chunk of change.   

To read more, go to http://championship.mql4.com/  

The 2007 Automated Trading Championship is coming to an end soon and the MetaQuotes Software Corp., ODL Securities, Alpari (UK) Ltd., FXDD, TRADERS’ journal sponsored event has a clear-cut winner.  Trader, Olexandr Topchylo from the Ukraine has an equity balance of about $89,000.  The second best trader is way behind at $34,600.  Topchylo has a candidates of science in Mathematics and Physics and if you're interested, you can read an interview with him at http://championship.mql4.com/2007/news/303.  Too bad he doesn't reveal his EA or algorithm. 

I've found this text-based trading range indicator to be quite valuable in my technical analysis.  Here is a picture of it on my charts:

This shows the daily range in pips for today, yesterday, the average over the previous 5 days, 10 days, and 20 days.   It also shows the stop losses you might use if you want to set it at 1/2 or 3/4 of the average daily range.  

It's particularly useful in guessing whether a momentum trade has the potential to continue or not.

If your interested in checking it out for Metatrader, you can download it here.

Forex ADR indicator 28/12/2006,10:30 13.35 Kb.

I'm posting this for a loyal visitor who is tired of Oanda's spread hikes.  I too have had issues with their spread hikes mostly during economic releases out of England.  Anyway, he's looking for feedback on any Metatrader brokers that others are using for live trading.  I personally have no experience with any Metatrader brokers.  If you do, please post a comment on your experiences.   

I mentioned last week that I was ridding myself of Esignal due to price, performance, and features.  Esignal was costing me about $160 per month and yet I found that it was very slow and the features they offered just weren't anything special.  I compare Esignal to Microsoft.  The development process is very slow probably due to bloated code and new features make their way into the application once every two years.  

I've found the alternatives out there just flat out better than esignal and cheaper.  I hear a lot about Xtick because it's cheaper, $85 a month and features are added when requested.  The downside is that there isn't any backtesting functionality and no way to develop custom indicators. 

I've found Metatrader to be unbelievable.  First, it's free. Second, they have backtesting functionality, and third, a language to develop experts and indicators.  It is also very fast.  But at the expense of speed, there is a downside.  There are no 10 minute charts and no 180 minute charts.  In fact, you can only select from 1 min, 5 min, 15 min, 30 min, 1 hour, 4 hour, daily, weekly, and monthly.  Their database probably contains data specific to each time period and therefore you cannot just select an arbitrary time period.  This is still sufficient for most people though and like I said, since it's free, you just cannot beat it.  

One thing that I've heard from many people is that it is very beneficial to use charting software that has a feed from the broker you make trades with especially if you are trading the shorter term charts.  If I am trading short-term, I use FXCM Power Charts because they are very good "web" charts and the feed is directly from FXCM (my broker.)  

My mailbox gets flooded with requests for the eSignal indicator I wrote that emulates the TTM Squeeze indicator.  The TTM Squeeze indicator is offered for sale by John Carter on his website at http://www.tradethemarkets.com .  My version is free but instead of responding to every email I get, I've added a new menu to the website where it is available for download.  In addition, I have added about 300 metatrader indicators for download.  This will be a repository for all to share indicators.  As long as you are a registered user, you can upload indicators.

To download indicators, go to the right menu item titled, "Metatrader Indicators" or visit:

http://www.forexproject.com/option,com_docman/Itemid,203/

To download the Squeeze indicator, follow the same link but click eSignal Indicators. 

For those of you that ask whether this squeeze indicator can be used for metatrader or tradestation or any other platform, the answer is no.  It can only be used for eSignal.

I am in the process of writing a squeeze indicator for metatrader but I am still learning the MQL language so it may be a while until I release it.  I did just finish a simple indicator that plots 5 EMA's that John Carter uses on all of his charts so if this is of interest, download here:

http://www.forexproject.com/option,com_docman/task,doc_download/gid,299/Itemid,203/  

After using paid charting packages such as eSignal, Intellicharts, Metastock, and Xtick, I just don't see a compelling reason to NOT use the freely available Metatrader.  I've become semi comfortable with Metatrader except that I just haven't taken the time to learn to program in MQL4 which is short for Metaquotes Language 4.  Just like my conversation about brokers yesterday, there is no perfect charting solution.  You just have to choose which have the features that you need most.  I will continue to use Metatrader not only because it is free but because the other paid packages don't provide me with anything more.

There are a lot of brokers out there that use the Metatrader server trading platform.  Why? One reason may be because they don't have to spend the time and money to develop their own.  You simply download the Metatrader client terminal and connect to any broker that publicly allows trading through their Metatrader trading platform.  Brokers are providing their own price feed so one of the things that will be different within the Metatrader client terminal between brokers are the prices.  So if you decide to use Alpari as your broker, you can do so by logging into their server from within Metatrader.  If you then decide to switch to Interbank, the only change are the login and the prices.  If you switch, the prices will re-populate with that particular broker's price data.  In addition to these changes, the time on your charts will also change which is the one annoying thing about Metatrader.  If Alpari is at time zone GMT and Interbank at GMT -3, this will be reflected on your charts.  The time in Metatrader is not based on your local computers time.  

This finally brings me to the reason for this post.  There are no major forex brokers that use the Metatrader platform but I wish there were because the ability to trade directly from within the platform could be its biggest strength.  Instead of purchasing an expensive API, you can automate your trades from Metatrader.  The H-system trading system I've been using for the past 3-4 weeks is a perfect candidate.  I've been sleep deprived during this time because a lot of the trades are opened during the European session.  I've seen a lot of advertising from Interbank FX I just don't know how much I could trust a small broker with my money.  Does anyone have any experiences with Metatrader platform brokers?  I'll certainly be looking into this because I just cannot ignore the power that Metatrader can have when combined with a live account.