FREE profitable robot?! Where?!

If you are not familiar with any of Meta Trader 4 and their FOREX automated trading system, this is a good time to start learning and understand what is actually happening. On the other hand, if you're an experienced trader, or you have very much experience in using other people's Expert Advisor(automated trading system) in the 1st place, I hope you find this is interesting because you're about to learn to develop your own system. You will never have to blackbox trading an EA you bought from ebay. Without knowing what is inside the bought EA, I have never feel comfortable to put down my hard earned money with these commercial EA.

Here is the deal. We're going to review the MACD Sample.mq4 from Meta Trader 4. You can find it freely available after you installed MT4. You may be getting ready to pay some money to buy a new EA from ebay, please hold the horses, because we may have something really worthwhile, and the best part of it is... it is FREE. You may think there is no free lunch, neither do I think there is free lunch. Therefore, we are going to have to do some work here. I've downloaded some history data from the broker and ran some test on it. You can download history by pressing F2 to get the history center.

Above screenshot showing bad data in USDJPY. You can notice that when you see only 1024 record existing in your computer. You'll have to click on the Download button to download history data from your broker.

Now, once download completed, MT4 will automatically extract all the downloaded file and import them to your platform. With these downloaded history, you'll be able to backtrack history as far back as 1999. Hold your Ctrl + R to access to your Tester window. Select Expert Advisor: MACD Sample, then Symbol change to the downloaded data. My case is EURJPY because I downloaded it. This is a crusial part, you can choose different type of modelling quality. I only use Every Tick as my modelling quality, as they provide the most precise test compare to real time trading. Finally, check the Use date box, fill in the column with desired testing date. Hit the start button and wait for it to finish testing.


Once test completed, you'll see the green indicator bar had filled up the entire column. And the Stop had changed to Start button again. Tabs at the lower tester window are for different function. You can view the tester graph, trade's detail, statistic report, and your trade journal.
-Settings is the main console to control your testing parameter.
-Results will show the trade's detail. From what price trade got opened, trade parameter modifications, take profits and stop losses.
-Graph will show the equity in 2D line chart
-Report is where the statistics are.
-Journal can be very useful to troubleshoot if an EA have error. Basically it record all trades in and out.

To generate a full report from your backtest, hit the Report tab in your tester window, right click in any column within your statistic report, select Save and report, and it will direct you to a file save window. Select your folder and it will save a copy of the tester report and open it up with your web browser as HTML format. Its very useful and handy.

So, here is the complete backtest of 2006 data on EURJPY with MACD Sample. Its FREE. This EA is not ready to use in my opinion. So, we're going to add in some parameter to ensure this EA is safe to use.

Meta Editor 4

Meta Editor 4 is the official programming platform for Meta Trader 4. It uses 3rd generation programming language, and very similar to C language programming, and they named it Meta Quotes Language 4. Anyway, from what I heard, MQL4 will be replace by MQL5 in near future. For me, its still too early, until they have finalized, launched it a year or two, then I'll consider to migrate to 5.


So, how do we get into Meta Editor? Its simple, by clicking the icon shows at the above picture, you'll be able to access to programming platform. I'm currently drafting on what kind of syllabus we should cover in the coming weeks. There will be a lot of mind blowing things, and I am going to reveal them to you one by one. You'll be able to understand exactly what is worth and what is not. I'll probably start with basic programming guidelines. Then to modify a readily made Expert Advisor in Meta Editor 4. In very short time, you'll be able to understand how does an EA work. You'll be able to program your own indicator/trading discretion in a template provided by Meta Editor 4.

I work with Meta Trader 4

Here is another infamous trading platform provided by Meta Quotes. Some of you may found this platform very useful because they also provide a platform for your iPhone and PDA. I will try to shorten the introduction for this trading platform, as they have too many function, some of them I do not even know how to use them. Basically, I like this platform because its free to use. Data feed from broker are always free. The most important is, I need their automated trading system facilities. I will be focusing on this 1 in the near future, to build a trading robot in an open blog and it will be free for the public to use it. You'll be able to understand the basic programming in automated trading system by following this blog.

The layout of MT4(Meta Trader 4) is very simple and easy to understand. The Navigator window will show you whether you're on a demo/live trading account. A demo account, the icon is in green color, or it will be gold in color if its a live account. Terminal window is where all your trade statistic situated. All your buy/sell orders will be situated here. The above screenshot shows I'm lossing 14pips. Quote board is in the Market Watch window. By double clicking the Bid/Ask price of desired trading pairs, the trading window will pop up.

This is a order window. You can key in your trade parameter here like lot size in Volume column, your stop loss, take profit and also comment on your trade. Finally, by clicking Sell/Buy button to execute your position instantly.

You can choose to place pending order by changing the value in Type column to Pending Order. You can place your execution price, and other parameter just like a market order. Some of you may not understand how pending order works. I decided to touch up a little bit here:

Buy stop : When current ask price is lower then your desired buy price
Buy limit: When current ask price is higher then your desired buy price
Sell stop: When current bid price is higher then your desired sell price
Sell limit: When current bid price is lower then your desired sell price

There is 1 very useful column here. By ticking the Expiry column, you can also put an expiry date to your pending trade. After the expiry, trade will be automatically deleted.

The best part of Meta Trader 4 is to have an investor password. If you are having a share account, or managing other's account, you can always publish your investor password. By accessing to the account with investor password, you can see all the running trades on the chart. All statistics are available. The only thing that the investor couldn't do is to execute any transaction.