Last time we have talked about the Comment function. It enables any kind of trader to get more relevant information on the chart without much effort, because it can print out several types of information. MQL4 Account Information documentation here We have started with the Account Balance. If you have done that, you might have noticed that the term AccountBalance() was followed by two round brackets. Any time you see this, you know you have found something that is like a little programm you can use in your code to calculate something or to give back some kind of value. This is called a function. If you ask somebody on the street “Could you tell me the time, please?” you have called the function “TellMeTheTime()”. That is the most easy way to call a function, because you will not need to deliver more information. He will know, what kind of time you are asking about. Otherwise, if you would ask the same person “Could you tell me the way, please?”, he might be a little irritated, because there is some information missing. Where do you want to go? That piece of missing information is called a parameter. Depending of the parameter you give that person he will give you a different answer. In MQL4 this would be something like: TellMeTheWay(Airport) or TellMeTheWay(railway station) Last time we used two functions. One was the Comment() function and the parameter AccountBalance() was inside the round brackets. That is like asking: “Could you comment my (AccountBalance()) please?”. There is lots of Account Information available, here are some examples you can use: AccountFreeMargin() for example will tell you, what? The free account margin of course. What do you think does AccountProfit()? You see how easy that is? If you want to know more about your account, for example the AccountStopoutLevel(), you will find the direct link to all the types of account information in the show notes for this episode. Oh, you are not restricted to print out only one information on the chart. You can line them up inside the round brackets of the Comment function. The only thing you need to do, is to seperate them by commas. Something like Comment (AccountBalance(), AccountEquity(),AccountFreeMargin()); would be totally fine for the compiler, but it is hard to read for humans if there isn’t any explanation what all that numbers actually mean. In the next episode we are going to make the output a little nicer for us humans by adding additional text with a userfriendly description.

What would you think is necessary to print data like your Account Balance or your Account Equity, your Trading profit or your Brokers spread directly on the chart on your computer screen? Shownotes: PDF-Version with Screenshots When I started to deal with automated trading, I had to spend lots of time with the classic fundamentals. Like learning data types and creating the stone-aged “Hello World” programs.   I can tell you, it is hard to focus on these dust-dry things if your subconcious mind has nothing that could motivate you to do that. I don’t know about you, but I need to see a benefit to put in all the effort it takes. Even if it is only 5 minutes.   So here is my version of your first programming example, that will allow you to watch a relevant output that will be automatically drawn and refreshed on your chart with every price change.   To follow these instructions you might want to open this episode on TradingTutorialAutomation.com because in the show notes I will include the screenshots that show the whole process.   Step 1: Open your Metatrader 4   By now you should already have downloaded and installed Metatrader 4. If not, go to the previous episodes of this course.   Step 2: Start your Automation Command Center   After your Metatrader 4 opens, hit the F4 Key on your keyboard. That will bring up the Metaeditor. See the show notes for details.   Now hit Control N, that will bring up the MQL4 Wizard. Select Expert Advisor.   Click Next and complete the entry in the field “Name” with the name “AccountInfo”for your first Expert Advisor, as seen in the screenshot in the show notes. Click on “Next” each time a new dialog comes up.   Step 3: Write your first magic line of code   Now you should see the Metaeditor create some code. Find the entry OnTick. This is the event, that runs every time a price change occurs. In the OnTick part, right above the closing bracket write the following line of MQL4 code.   Comment (AccountBalance());   See the show notes on TradingTutorialAutomation.com for the exact syntax.   Step 4: Compiling your first MQL4 program   To finish your work, you now have to compile your first self written Expert Advisor to make it usable in Metatrader 4. This is done by hitting the F7 key – or clicking on the compile button. If you have done everything right, you should now be rewarded by a compiler response saying “0 errors, 0 warnings”.   Step 5: Testing your first automated Expert Advisor   Now hit the F4 key again to return to your Metatrader. After you have successfully compiled your program in the last step, you will see it on the left side in the Navigator view. To test it, simply drag it onto the chart with your mouse.   Congratulations, if you have done everything right, you should now magically see appear a line with your account balance in the left upper corner of your chart. And on the right upper corner you should see a little smiley and the name of your first, self written program.   You have just written your first complete working Trading Automation Module in under 5 minutes. Did it hurt? No, I don’t think so. It is the proof that you can do it and it is the first step to go for more.   You want to print out your Equity, your trading profit, the strength of the trend or any other trading related information directly on your Metatrader charts?   No problem, just go to the next episode or become a Golden Goose Course member on TradingTutorialAutomation.com right now.  Automated Trading Tutorial Related Posts:MQL4 Course for your Inbox? Click here... MQL4 Video Bootcamp 2016 – Intro

I remember, how it felt to be a discretionary trader. When I made my first trading experiences, I was constantly in doubt and fear to loose money by making stupid mistakes. And I did. I remember  an evening when I missed a comma in the lot size and opened a position ten times bigger as wanted.   I remember awaking in the middle of the  night and thinking about my open trades. I remember how often I was almost sure that I needed to get up right away and  check my Metatrader.   And I remember how excited I was when someone told me that it is possible to automate your MT4 trading  with MQL.   This weekend I have  released the  study letter 15 of the  Golden Goose Construction Kit that describes how to create a trailing stop to protect your trades over night for a better sleep.   And if you are where I was not so long ago, this  might be the one thing that would probably help you most if you have to leave your PC and go to sleep or to work .   Sign up for the free course and send me a mail with the keyword Nightly Trailing Stop and I will send you a stand allone version for Metatrader 4 right away.   Imagine the relief when you no longer have to worry if your open trades are going to ruin you while you are away from your Desk.   Actually it is not so hard to code something like this, but if you prefer you can also get ready to use modules that can be adjusted to your needs without any coding.   How does the Nightly Trailing Stop Module work? Well, It checks the Highs and Lows for a number of candles on your chart. 100 candles are predefined, but you can adjust the number to your needs. If you are in a long trade, it will trail to the last Low. If you are in a short trade, it will trail to the last High.   The Nightly Trailing stop comes for Demo accounts only, but if you request the source code, you could also adjust it to work on your live account – if you know what you are doing!   And if you don’t know what you are doing right now, why not invest 5 minutes a day and become a member of the Golden Goose Course today?  Automated Trading Tutorial Related Posts:MQL4 Course for your Inbox? Click here... MQL4 Video Bootcamp 2016 – Intro

Trading success principles. Everybody is writing about trading success principles. Most systems are complicated and I don’t understand them. For example there is the Elliot wave system. People count ups and downs and expect the market to go up or down in their order. And if it doesn’t, they believe that they have messed up by counting waves.   That was nothing I could relate to. I wanted to find something more reliable and much more easy, so I decided to test. I have a lot of trading books and some of them are more helpful than others.   One of the better ones is from Van Tharp and it talks about expectancy. How much do you expect an average trade to make? Van Tharp has some good examples to explain expectancy, but there is a catch.   After 10, 100 or 200 trades you might still get other results, because the law of averages requires big numbers to work well.   If you roll a dice twice and the 6 comes up two times, you might expect to have the same result the next 10 times. But we all know, that is not what happens. In reality you would expect to throw the dice six thousand times and get nearly a thousand results for each number on it.   If you do 2 trades a week, it will take you forever to reach that significant number of trades. You could trade for 10 years before you notice that your system doesn’t work as expected.   So I decided to set up a goal for my automated systems. I wanted a system that was able to make profit for over 10 years in backtesting in at least 10 currency pairs.   If it is a system that is based on mathematical principles and expectancy it should be able to produce consistent results.   If it takes you 10 minutes to do a manual trade with historical data, you would still have to trade almost 170 hours to come up with a thousand trades. You would need to sit in front of you charts for a whole week, without sleeping, eating and without making mistakes or taking breaks. And that would only be one of 10 currency pairs, so if you want to do it for ten pairs, do not make any appointmens for the next two and a half month.   But if you can do thousands of automated trades by within minutes, I would consider that result to be more meaningful. How about you?  Automated Trading Tutorial Related Posts:MQL4 Course for your Inbox? Click here... MQL4 Video Bootcamp 2016 – Intro

What exactly is  it that makes a profit possible? Let’s see. If you have decided to buy something and you want to sell it for a profit, do you have to sell it for a higher or a lower price? Let’s say you buy a brandnew car. You drive it for 5 years or so and than you decide to sell it. Would you expect some buyer to pay more or less?   When I buy a car, I want to use it. When I open a trade, I want to make a profit! I can not use my position for any other purpose. The only reason to buy or to sell something on the markets is to make a profit. At least for me.   And yes, sometimes I have to find out, that I opened my trade exactly at the time, when the market goes against me. It happens often.  The only thing that could avoid that would be a good fortune teller.   And that is the problem, at least for me. I do not believe in fortune telling. If people would know market moves in advance, the moves could never happen the way they do, because of the undisputable law of supply and demand.   If you offer your used car for half of its value, lots of buyers will show up. If you offer it for a price that is double the value, nobody will buy it in a hundred years.   And if you trade to make a profit,  you will have to wait until your position is profitable.   It is very hard to do this for humans, but a trading system that is automated has absolutely no problems with that. It will wait until your long position reaches your Take Profit mark. It will not doubt, it will not spend sleepless nights to think it all over and it will not act out of emotional reasons.   For me the thing that made profits possible was the fact, that I could find a way to no longer think about my trades all the time. Yes, I check my status once or twice a day, but I do not always live in doubt and fear anymore. It is a relief to have your system do that for you.   I guess humans are uncomfortable with the pressure of trading and that makes us do stupid things when the pain is to strong.   Imagine how you could feel if you knew that there is someone trading exactly according to your rules 24/7 around the clock. But that someone has more discipline. That someone is not susceptible when it comes to emotion. That someone does not smoke another cigarette, eat another cookie or skips the next visit at the dentist.   If you could create a better You when it comes to trading, would you be willing to invest 5 minutes a day? Yes, it might take you a few weeks or month before you reach your goal. But you will be older anyway, even if you do not improve your skills at all. So time is no argument for me. I needed two years to learn all that stuff, but there is hope for you. We are not going to learn all the possible functions that our programming solution provides. In fact it is only a tiny fraction neccessary to get results. So that will save you a lot of time.     You must also overcome one of the greatest enemies most traders don’t even notice. But that is another episode.   This time we are talking about a simple perception. If you buy something for a profit, the price must go up before you sell it. You wouldn’t sell your motorbike in the winter and you wouldn’t sell your ice-skates in the summer, because you know that it would significantly reduce the price you could achieve for your goods.   But when it comes to trading, people simply forget all these obvious rules. They buy and sell because of emotions. The loss hurts, so they close a position and watch the price move in their direction immediately afterwards. That makes them angry and they go all in and double their position, only to see the price drop once more.   Several years and a lot of loosing trades later they do the exact same thing and achieve the exact same results, still thinking they could beat the market. But if you do, what you have always done, you will get the same results over and over again.   Is this something that sounds familiar to you? Have you ever considered trading to be the only thin

Okay, by this time you should have downloaded and installed Metatrader 4 with standard options. So what are we going to do with this shiny new thing? When I first started Metatrader, I had no clue how to do anything with it. If you are in that stage, I would suggest to take a little walk around on YouTube. There are lots of tutorials that can teach you what a chart is and what all the buttons in Metatrader can do for a newbie. The short version is that Metatrader can display market information that is downloaded in real time and you can open or close trades with it. If you never have done this before, you should absolutely start with a demo account, because you are going to make costly mistakes. For example you might open a position with a lot size that is ten times bigger than usual. Oops. Start small and save with a demo account. If you are in Europe or anywhere outside the U.S. I would suggest Forextime or Roboforex for your first demo account. I have reasons for that and we are going to discuss that in another episode. Maybe you already have a demo account or you prefer to use your own broker. Fine. You can do that, as long as Metatrader4 is supported and your broker allows automated trading. Some brokers have restrictions. Your broker might forbid hedging for example. A good website to start with your broker research is ForexPeaceArmy.com. Look out for their “Forex Brokers Reviews” – Link in the menu. If you already have a broker and a demo account, you can start automated trading in 5 minutes. Open Metatrader 4 and fill in your account details, Metatrader will find your account and start to download data. That is the right time to go into the options menu and set the correct settings. Find options and the tab Expert Advisors. There is an option with the text “Allow automated trading”. Mark the checkbox to allow it. You might also want to go to the events tab and disable all the notification sounds. If you have downloaded the EX4 file for you Golden Goose System, you should now see it in the Navigator view on the left side. If that Navigator view is missing, simply hit (CTRL + N). Drag that Golden Goose entry on the left with you mouse to the black currency chart on the right. If you have done everything right, you should now see a smiley and the text entry Golden Goose on the upper right corner of your currency chart. Well done! You just have automated Metatrader 4 in under 5 minutes. If there is a longtime trend you should also see your Golden Goose Starter Kit open a trade within the first minute. Other courses start with things like printing “Hello world!” and you could learn data types for the next few months. Most people are long gone before they see their first automated trade. But you have done it in under 5 minutes, Congratulations! How does it feel?Automated Trading Tutorial Related Posts:MQL4 Course for your Inbox? Click here... MQL4 Video Bootcamp 2016 – Intro

A lot of people buy trading robots without any clue what they pay for. I guess they think it is a good solution, because they expect a ready to go system that will make them money without any further effort. Most people I know from my German course told me, they spend money for things that didn’t work.   If you have considered to buy a tradiing robot, you might know, how these systems are sold. Everything is positive and you will see images of bundled dollar bills, attractive young women on sportscars or big yachts, get examples and referrals from instant millonaires and they will tell you: You have to buy today or the last 3 available copies go away. We all know, that software and information products do not sell out, because they have no stock. But it works, because it sells. Scarcity and emotion and the desperate wish to make a quick buck make that robot shiny and desirable.   But if you don’t know, what that thing does and how that thing works, you might be always be in doubt and fear.   But only a fraction of traders know how powerful the automation function is that comes with Metatrader for free. Yes, it is a full featured programming language and yes, most coding gurus make it a complicated thing to use and understand, but if you use a word processing software in your job or a spreadsheet calculation software, you will already know, that these tools also offer hundreds of functions, fonts and settings that you never touched in your whole life.   If you are a native English speaker, you are only using a tiny fraction of the five hundred to six hundred thousand thousand terms, the English language contains.   It is the same with automated trading. I started to learn all that stuff and it took me almost two years. I will never use all of the functions that are included, actually I have taken out a tiny fraction.   And that was the reason, while I created this course. You can save 80 to 90 percent of the time because we are only going to use a tiny fraction of the MQL language – so it takes only a fraction of the time to learn it.   Do you think this is to complicated for you? I know that there was a time when things like writing, reading or driving a car seemed to be a complicated thing. When I made my first attempts to drive a car, shifting gears, looking over my shoulder and watching out for road signs or other cars was overwhelming. Today I can do it without even thinking about what I am doing.  Automated Trading Tutorial Related Posts:MQL4 Course for your Inbox? Click here... MQL4 Video Bootcamp 2016 – Intro

What do you think? Is trading an area where you have to spend huge amounts of money, just to get started? Some people might want to persuade you that it is so. But there is another way. If you ask a butcher about a recipe for lunch, he will always recommend meat. That is because the butcher sells meat. If you ask somebody who sells trading software, he will always come up with reasons to spend you money on good trading software. And there is a market for that, so it works.   You can make people pay for anything, even for air in cans. I have seen a video where some company does exactly that in Asia. All they had to do is to go to one of this big towns where the smog is polluting the air.   And I do also spend good money on several trading gear, especially books. But there is one software, that not only is a good choice by financial terms, it will also allow you to automate parts or maybe even your whole own, personal trading system. This software has even gotten better last year, because it was improved by the guys from Metaquotes to give you more options and a better way to create your very own, custom taylored trading system.   The software I am talking about is called Metatrader and there is a good chance that you are already using it, because it is the most popular and flexible trading platform on the market today.   You can download it for Windows, for your Mac and I even use it with Ubuntu Linux and Wine. The trading software Metatrader comes with preconfigured tools that are exactly what you need to automate things like – say a trailing stop that will protect your trades while you sleep and move the stop loss in your desired direction.   That was, what I wanted when I started to consider trading automation. I wanted automated help. I wanted something that could watch my open trades in my interest when I needed to go to work.   Can you imagine the relief it brings, when you have no fear to leave your tades alone, because you know they are protected?   Would you like to go to bed without lying awake and enjoy a good nights sleep while your system is trading exactly according to your rules?   As I mentioned before, I believe nobody can trade a system that does not fit his own style. But it is possible to create your own system that does exactly, what you do today.   And it can do it night and day without getting tired and without missing something that you don’t see when you are not in front of your screen.   Is this something you are interested in?    Automated Trading Tutorial Related Posts:MQL4 Course for your Inbox? Click here... MQL4 Video Bootcamp 2016 – Intro

What do you think? Could you cook a delicious meal or bake a tasty cake exactly the way your Grandmother did? About twelve years ago, I decided that I wanted to make my own pizza. I wanted it to be tasty, I wanted it to be easy to create and I wanted to do it in 10 minutes or less with common ingredients.   So I started to play around and try out this and that. And I have to admit, that the first attempts were a mess. You couldn’t eat that stuff, maybe you could use it as a frisbee.   But my results got better after a few month and now my whole family likes my pizza. My daughter loves to cook and she asked me if I could teach her, how to make my 10 minute pizza.   Guess how long it took her to learn? Exactly 10 minutes, because of that most important thing, that you also can use to improve your trading results. What it is? It is called a recipe, a formula, a step by step guide, a process and it might have several dozen other names.   But to pinpoint it, it is to reproduce something that works and is documented in a way, that allows other people to repeat the steps, focus on the right process and the right ingredients  that produced the desired result before.   If you build a house, you are going to plan it. You decide if you are going to have a shower and a bath tub, and the exact location and size of these two things a long time before even the first part of the house will be build.   You can measure every inch and you know the exact size of every room. That is how people build houses and it is common behaviour.   But if you are going to trade, you do what feels right, might work or worse, you do what other people told you to avoid to be guilty later on when your money is gone. You chose something today and another thing tomorrow.   If houses were trading systems, some workers would show up by random and would use construction material as it showes up on the construction area to build anything at random.   If you ask one of the workers what part of the house he is building right now, he might say: “I don’t know, we will see how it works out and decide later where this fits into the house”.   That way you would get a roof with two different angles lying on the ground, even before the first floor was build.   Is this something, that feels familiar to you when it comes to trading? Are you a hope trader, always hoping that things will work out? Then the Golden Goose course might be for you! Or do you prefer to produce cake with fish by guessing?  Automated Trading Tutorial Related Posts:MQL4 Course for your Inbox? Click here... MQL4 Video Bootcamp 2016 – Intro

If you could wave a magic wand and get the results you want, what would it be? There are not so much fairys around these days, but it remains a good question:   If you could wave a magic wand and get the results you want, what would it look like? I can only answer this question for myself, so here is the answer.   I would like to trade with certainty. I would love to be sure that progress is made. I would like to feel the feeling of relief and the perception that everything finally came to an happy end for me.   If this sounds strange to you, please forgive me, I am 44 years old, I am from Germany and I am not a native speaker, so I try to translate everything as good as I can. Language is just a way to express myself. If I see a tree, if I think of a tree, it will never be the same as a real tree.   And I believe that the market you see will never be the market I see. You have your own rules and insights and you will need to trade according to you own, personal presumption of the market.   Have you ever asked yourself, why so many people out there have success with things that never work for you? Do you consider yourself incompetent sometimes, because your results do not match your beliefs of the market?   Then this insight could bring you some relief, the one thing that most traders need desperately, I think.   Everybody has to trade his own perceptions of the markets. That is what I believe.   I think if you want to be successful in trading, you can not trade another persons system. He might have much more money or he might have some insights that you don’t have. You could do the exactly same thing and it might not work for you.   I have an example for this. When I was a young guy, I never had a girl friend. I tried to impress the girls, I tried to do everything like the other guys, but it never worked for me. I simply wasn’t authentic. And everybody was aware of it on an uncounscious level.   I believe, if you want to be successful in trading, you will have to create your own rules, exactly the way, you do it for you life.   Nobody can do your pushups for you. You have to do it and you can do it 5 minutes each day, every day to see the results.   It might take some time, maybe a year. But if you don’t do your 5 minute baby steps each day, you will be one year older anyway – without any progress. So is it worth the effort? What do you think? Can you do it?  Automated Trading Tutorial Related Posts:MQL4 Course for your Inbox? Click here... MQL4 Video Bootcamp 2016 – Intro