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In this video, we want to create an Expert Advisor to place a sell limit order. This sell limit order is a pending order and it will be triggered when the price rises and crosses this line and as soon as that happens we will have a sell trade. It might be a little hard to understand the sense, especially in the beginning. Why should anybody wait for the price to rise and sell afterwards, but in charting there are actually strategies where this makes sense. For now, we want to answer the question: how can we create an Expert Advisor in MQL4 that is able to place such a pending sell limit order automatically? To do that please click on the little button here or press F4 in your Metatrader. Now you should see the Metaeditor and here you want to click on File/ New/ Expert Advisor from template. Continue. I will call this one: Simple Sell Limit EA. Continue. Continue and finish. Now everything above the OnTick function can be deleted and please also delete the two comment lines here. The first thing we do is to check if no open order exists and that would be the case if the OrdersTotal function returns zero. In that case we want to send a sell limit order and we do that by using the OrderSend command, but actually we have to pass a few parameters. So, let’s start the parameter list with a round bracket. The first parameter is the current currency pair on the chart. That is delivered with the MQL4 function: Symbol. In the second parameter, we say that we want to trade a sell limit. That is done by using the constant: OP_SELLLIMIT. If you mark this constant and hit F1 you will see that there is also a buy limit, a buy stop or a sell stop. These four constants here are used for pending orders, while OP_BUY or OP_SELL would cause a direct order. Now we have to tell MQL4 how much we want to order. In our case the position size will be 10 micro lot, the pending order will be placed 20 points above the current Ask price and if you click on one of the currency pairs here you will see that you have a red line and a blue line. The red line is for the Ask price. That is the price we have to pay if we buy something. The blue line here is the Bid price, that is what we would get if we sell something. We have to tell MQL4 how much movement and deviation is allowed. We only want to allow 3 pips, so if the price movement… so whenever the volatility is too high here our OrderSend command will not be triggered. In this simple example, we don’t use a Stop Loss, so the next parameter is a zero. Our Take Profit will be 10 points below the Bid price. We don’t need a comment so we use the constant: NULL, we also use zero for the id number because we don’t need one. The same is for the expiration date because we don’t want our Expert Advisor order to expire and last but not least, we pass the color green, to show a green arrow on the chart. If you mark that and press the F1 key you will see a lot of other colors that you could use. Okay. We started our parameter list with a round bracket, so let’s add a closing round bracket and a semicolon. Please don’t forget the closing curly bracket and if you are finished you can click on the compile button or press F7. You should have no errors and no warnings here and in that case, you can click on the little button here or press F4 to go back to Metatrader. In Metatrader please click on: “View/ Strategy Tester” or press CTRL and R and now please pick the file: SimpleSellLimitEA.ex4, mark the visual mode option here and start your test. Here is our pending order, you can see that Metatrader has placed a sell limit above the current Ask price and now you know how to create an EA to automatically trade sell limits in MQL4 and you have coded it yourself with a few lines of MQL4 code.

In this video we want to talk about an Exponential Moving Average that is creating buy or sell signals, the signals are based on the direction. If the Moving Average is above or below the candles; whenever the candles are below the Moving Average this would be a sell signal and when the candles are above the Moving Average this creates a buy signal. Now how can we create an Expert Advisor in MQL4 that is able to output the buy and sell signals based on an Exponential Moving Average? To do that please click on the little button here or press F4 on your keyboard and now you should see the Metaeditor window and here you want to click on “File/ New/ Expert Advisor (template)” from template, “Continue”, I will call this one: “SimpleEMA” for Exponential Moving Average, click on “Continue”, “Continue” and “Finish” and now you can delete everything that is above the “OnTick” function and let’s remove the two comment lines here. Okay, we start by creating a string variable for the signal, we call it: “signal” and we don’t assign a value because we are going to calculate it in the next step and this is how it’s done: we use the built-in “iMA” function that comes with MQL4. It needs to have a few parameters; the first one is the current symbol on the chart – in our case the symbol is the British Pound against the Australian Dollar (GBP/AUD) – the second parameter is the period that we have selected on our chart, we are using the 1-minute chart here and these two variables: “_Symbol” and “_Period” are able to find out what kind of currency pair you trade and which of the timeframes you use. The next parameter is for 20 candles, so the value here is calculated based on the last 20 candles here and this parameter is a shift value. If you mark the “iMA” function and press F1 you will see that we have a shift value here that is called: “ma_shift” and another one here that is also called: “shift”. Let’s open a new chart window: click on “Insert/ Indicators/ Moving Average”, let’s ad a Moving Average with a shift value of 0 and another one in yellow with a shift value of 20 and now you see what it does, it moves the drawing of the Moving Average into the future. I could also use -20 here and now it was moved to the past, this expression: “MODE_EMA” actually lets you select between a Simple Moving Average and Exponential Moving Average, a Smooth Moving Average and a Linear Weighted Moving Average. To find out what the differences are you might maybe want to look up the 4 types on investopedia or vikkipedia. The Exponential Moving Average basically is a simple Moving Average but the last few current candles play a bigger role in the calculation. You could play around with the 4 types here to see the differences on your chart, for now we go with the Exponential Moving Average and it should be calculated based on the close price, so we use “PRICE_CLOSE” here. This is the offset shift and this is the shift that we have, and this is the shift value we have changed in this example to move the drawing of the Moving Average to the right or to the left. It might take you some time to get used to it but for now both values are 0 and if the SMA is below the bid price – that would be the case if my Moving Average (MyMovingAverage) is smaller than “Bid” – that would create a buy signal so we assign the word: “buy” to our signal. Of course we also want to calculate the other case. If our SMA is above the ask price; so if my Moving Average (MyMovingAverage) is bigger than “Ask” that would be a sell signal so we assign the word: “sell” to our signal variable. In the last step we want to create an output on our chart so here we use the “Comment” function that will output the text: “The current signal is:” followed by our “signal” and when you’re done you can click on the “Compile” button here or press F7, that worked without any errors and now you can click here or press F4 to go back to Metatrader. In Metatrader we need to use a little trick; we click on “In...

In this video we are going to talk about a simple SMA shift function that is included in MQL4. You see a red and a green line here, this one is a Moving Average for 20 candles. Actually, if you pause the system and zoom in by hitting the minus key on your keyboard you will see that both SMA’s are identical except one of those is shifted. Whenever the green one is above the red one that’s a buy signal for us and when we have a crossover and the red one is above the green one it will change to sell here. Now how can we create an Expert Advisor that is able to calculate one and the same Simple Moving Average and create a signal out of the shifted second SMA? To do that please click on the little button here or press a F4 on your keyboard and now you should see the Metaeditor window and here you want to select “File/ New/ Expert Advisor (template)” from template. Continue. I will call the file: Simple SMA Shift (SimpleSMAShift). Click on continue, continue and finish. Now you can delete everything that is above the “OnTick” function and please also remove the two comment lines here. First we need to create a string variable for the signal, that will also be called signal and it will not be assigned any value here because we are going to calculate that later on. Now we want to calculate the Simple Moving Average for 20 minutes and we can do that by using the “iMA” function. This “iMA” will be calculated for the current symbol on the chart, it will be calculated based on the 1-minute period and we use 20 candles to calculate it. Now if you mark the “iMA” function and press F1 you will see that this parameter is a shift value and the last parameter also is a shift value! I found that to be extremely difficult to understand when I was starting out, so let me explain here. This shift value here is used to move the red line here 20 candles into the future. If I click the pause button here, move the mouse above the red SMA and select MA properties you will see that I have selected a shift value of 20 here. Let’s change that to 5 for testing purposes and you will see that the red line now is much closer to the green line. I will change that back now, the shift value is 20 again and when I click on “OK” it is drawn 20 candles into the future once again. So, that’s what you can do with parameter 4 here. The last parameter here is the second shift value and this one is used to tell MQL4 which candle should be calculated. We use the shift value of 1 to calculate the close price of candle 1. Now if I change this shift value here to a higher value the indicator wouldn’t be calculated for the last candle but for a candle long ago. We use a Simple Moving Average here and the calculation is based on the close prices so this parameter here is: “MODE_SMA” for a Simple Moving Average and we use: “PRICE_CLOSE” to do a calculation that is based on the close price of candle 1 here. Okay! This was our first Simple Moving Average. Let’s calculate the second one! It will also be calculated for 20 minutes but we use a shift value of 20 because we want the red Simple Moving Average line to be drawn 20 candles ahead. If My Moving Average1 (MyMovingAverage1) is above My Moving Average2 (MyMovingAverage2) – in MQL4 that’s; if (MyMovingAverage1>MyMovingAverage2) we want to set the signal to buy, so we assign the word: “buy” to the variable called signal. In the other case if My Moving Average1 (MyMovingAverage1) is below My Moving Average2 (MyMovingAverage2) – let’s assign the word: “sell” to the signal. And last but not least we create an output for the signal directly on the chart by using the “Comment” function and that will output the words: “The current signal is:” followed by the calculated value for the signal. Okay, if you have done everything you can click on the compile button here or press F7 on your keyboard and now your Expert Advisor should be compiled without any errors and without any warnings, and if it worked you can click on the little butt...

In this video, we want to calculate the main signal for this Oscillator here. This is the MACD. It’s very popular. So let’s find out how we can code an entry signal with MQL4.   A separate chart below the candle chart shows the Mac D oscillator.   It has two values that each show a signal value.   In this case, we want to figure out the signal for the main line.   To use it, we create a new MQ4 file and put it in the same directory as the other Platin System files.   The name of the file is CheckEntryMacD.mq4, and it has only one function called CheckEntry.   This function works out the buy and sell signals for our system and sends them back.   In fact, oscillators aren’t made to send signals. They are instead used to confirm or filter out other signals.   But that doesn’t mean we can’t use them, since all we need for our trading system is a clear entry signal.   First, the signal is put into a string variable. But for now we don’t assign a value as we need to calculate it now.   That can be done by using the integrated function called I MacD.   It comes with MQL4 and we need to pass a few parameters.   The first two parameters are for the currently selected symbol on the chart and the currently selected time period on that chart.    Three more values follow to define the period for the fast exponential moving average, then the slow exponential moving average and the signal period.   The values are 12, 26 and 9 as these are the standard values for the MacD oscillator.   Then we need to define that we want to calculate the result based on the close price.   In this example we use Mode_Main to calculate the main signal for the Mac D oszillator.   And the last value is 0 as it is a shift value which is not required.   Now we can calculate the signal by using the Mac D value.   If that number is greater than 0, we want to sell, so we give our signal the word “sell” when that happens.   If the value is less than 0, that means we want to buy, so we’ve given the signal the word “buy.”   And when our function is done, we want to send the MacD signal back to our main module, which has the OnTick function.   Please don’t forget to save your entry file, but you don’t have to compile it right now.   The compilation is done in the main module, but before you do that, you need to find the include statement for the entry signal and change it to use our new file, CheckEntry MacD.mq4.   You can turn off other entry modules by putting two slashes at the beginning of a line.   By the way, you can also use this entry signal file in your own system, if you have one.   Then, press F7 or click the compile button to compile your main module and the entry signal file that came with it.   No error messages should come up.   If you have trouble, you might want to buy the Premium course or watch one of the beginner videos to learn how it works.   Okay, by now, you should have working entry signal for the MACD Oscillator. So this is it for this video. And I will see you in the next one.

In this video, we are going to create an entry module for this Oscillator here.    It is called the accumulation distribution oscillator. Usually, Oscillators are used as filters, but in this video, we are going to create an MQL file to create an entry signal.    So, let’s see how this is done.   The Accumulation Distribution Oscillator is shown on a separate chart below the candlestick chart.   It has a single signal line that indicates a value.   To use it, we need to make a separate MQ4 file in the same folder as the other Platinum System files.   The name of the file is CheckEntry_ I A D.mq4, and it only has one function called CheckEntry.   The buy and sell signals for our system are calculated by this function.   In fact, oscillators are usually not used to make signals, instead, they are used to filter other signals.   But that doesn’t mean we can’t use them, because all we need for our trading system is a clear signal that works.   We start by creating the signal string variable.   This will eventually be sent back to our main function, but first we need to make the signal.   That can be done with the builtin MQL4 function IAD.   We only need to provide three parameters.   The first one is for the current symbol on the chart.   The second parameter is for the period that we have selected on that chart.   Parameter three is for the candle.   We want to calculate the value for candle 0 and store it in a variable and we also calculate it for the candle 1 and store that in a different variable.   Now we are able to calculate the entry signal.   If the current value is bigger than the value for the last candle, we would consider that to be a buy signal.   Therefore we assign the word buy to our signal.   Otherwise if the current value is smaller than the last value, that would be a sell signal and then we assign the word sell to our signal.   Finally we want to return the calculated signal to the main module, therefore we use the return statement.   Please don’t forget to save your input file, but you don’t have to compile it right away.   Compilation is done in the main module, but before you do that, find the include statement for the input signal and change it to use our new file, CheckEntry_ I A D.mq4.   If you put two slashes at the beginning of a line, you can turn off other input modules.   After this, you can press F7 or click the Compile button to compile your main module and the entry signal file that we have included.   There shouldn’t be any mistakes.   If you do have mistakes, you might want to buy the premium course or watch one of the basic tutorial videos to learn how to do it.   Okay, if everything is okay, you should have a working version for the Accumulation distribution oscillator, now.    As I said, you can use it as a filter, or use it as an entry signal in the Platin System or in your own system.    Thank you for watching, and I will see you in the next video.

In this video I would like to talk about something that you can call the blinding flash of the obvious. When you test something with the strategy tester, you may overlook things that play an important role in your everyday real time trading. This is one of those examples. Whenever you run a strategy test, you probably forget one or two things that might harm you in real time trading.   The first thing is inconsistency. While you are using the strategy tester, you might not have inconsistent conditions, but in real time trading those are part of the game. You might have an outage of power or a problem with your internet connection and your Expert Advisor might not run for a few hours, or even days. We had that happen often. And if one thing is likely to happen, it is that one of those outages will happen at exactly the worst time and under exactly the worst conditions. For example, it might happen while you are on vacation.   Here is what happened a few years ago. The Expert Advisor had a value for the last buy price and the last sell price, but then it was interrupted. During the outage the market conditions changed, but the Expert Advisor didn’t notice that. Later, the Expert Advisor continued to calculate the decisions based on the wrong and outdated conditions. That is unlikely to happen in a strategy test, because you have no option to simulate a 7 hour internet outage.   When I started out with MQL4 I was often heavily criticized by people because I didn’t use the OnInit function. Yes, the calculation of everything whenever a new Tick comes in takes more processing power. But it is well spend CPU calculation time when you want to avoid inconsistent values and assumptions. Think of a real world example. You might have found yourself dressed up totally wrong, because the conditions change while you didn’t notice it. For example, you might come back from your summer vacation and as soon as you have landed you notice that a Tshirt is not enough when the airport of your home country is drowning in snow.   The OnInit function will only run once, at the start of the Expert Advisor so it is a good idea to check if some critical conditions are still true whenever the price changes. In the Platin System we use a function called CheckForTick to do that. If you use your own Expert Advisor with just a single file and no library imports, you can do that right inside of the OnTick function that comes with MQL. And don’t only rely on strategy test results.   Those are a good indicator if something is likely to work. But nothing replaces real time operation, even if it is on a Cent account. So please make sure that you check the conditions and assumptions you have during real time trading, because as Mark Twain once said: “What gets us into trouble is not what we don’t know. It’s what we know for sure that just ain’t so.”

An automatic trading system works the same way as an automatic navigation system.   Most people think that an automatic system should work for any currency pair and in any situation.   But it doesn’t.   It will do a certain thing when it meets a certain kind of reality.   Think about a car trip or the way you get to work every day.   Most likely, it won’t take you the same amount of time every day.   Even though you wake up at the same time as yesterday, it’s raining today.   You change how you dress and bring your umbrella with you.   So you get into your car about a minute late.   Because it is raining, it is hard to see, so other drivers may be going slowly.   This causes a traffic jam on the highway, and now you’re really late.   So you try to go another way that your navigation system tells you to take.   And that is probably the same alternative route that hundreds of other drivers with the same navigation system have been told to take.   Now the traffic jam you wanted to avoid is right in front of you because everyone else who wanted to avoid it did the same thing.   In this case, what you thought was the best way to avoid a delay was actually what caused the delay.   And I think every car owner knows that you can’t always avoid problems.   Some days, you may have to deal with roads that are icy.   Some roads might be closed on other days.   Your navigation system will try to get you to your destination as quickly as possible, but it can’t keep you from getting into an accident.   Even your navigation system won’t be able to help you park your car at 130 kilometers per hour.   You are still the driver, and you decide how fast to turn the next corner.   You decide whether to follow the directions from your navigation system or to get off the highway at the next exit.   You wouldn’t think that your GPS would be able to tell the future.   It works by figuring out the odds, but it can’t tell you if a garbage truck is blocking the side street around the next corner.   The same thing is done by a trading system.   It figures out what the probabilities are, but that doesn’t mean it can foresee the future.

In this video, I would like to briefly discuss one particular situation and that is a trend reversal here. We see two moving averages here. One calculates the value for 1000 candles and the other this red moving average is for 1100 candles. And when that’s up, we have a downtrend. As you can see, it was like that for a long time and predominantly the price moved below these moving averages until that suddenly changed here on September 13. If we zoom into the chart at plus, we see this pretty big candle here and that caused the price to move from one side to the other side of the moving averages. That means because the green moving average is currently above, in theory we have an incipient uptrend. However, because the price is below both moving averages, there is no trading until we have a crossover here or the price moves back to the other side. This has the advantage that we are not trading against the long-term trend.   Even if our own entry signal provides us with buy and sell signals here, we will only trade again when the current signal direction matches the long-term trend. This has worked quite well over the last few weeks. We are now at an account balance of 10,105 5 €. Currently we are in profit here. Who would like, can look at that on the web page PlatinSystem.Org also times more exactly. There you can find the statistics. And we see here just no trading trend, because I have changed the system yesterday again. Because I have taken the situation as an opportunity to set up here above and below the moving average still a transition zone, in which is not traded. This means that if the price moves here in the area of the moving averages, then no trade was opened, because the direction can change again at any time. But if you zoom into the chart and look at this over the last time, you can see that we are already in a pretty stable downtrend. And now it’s just a matter of waiting to see if the trend finally turns.   That would mean the price stays permanently above these two moving averages and the green average stays above. Only then would that be a permanent trend reversal from the descent of the Euro US Dollar. Or we will see another crossover here shortly. At the moment, it looks more like that. That would be a signal that the downtrend continues. And then we would like to continue to act so. Of course, now in the short term, to make things more interesting, we could change the values here for the moving averages. But that’s not the point. Because although the entry signal does not determine whether a system is profitable or not, it is part of a fixed set of rules that should be followed. Just like in a soccer game. There are lines and goals and referees. And no one would show up to a soccer game with flippers and a golf club. That’s why I’m just going to enjoy the quiet time here until trading turns itself back on. I can just drag the system here onto the chart and have it trade with the default values.   And you learned in this simple video how to use two simple moving averages to determine the long term trend direction for your own system so that it will only trade automatically when the long term trend and your own entry signal match. Thanks for watching and see you in the next video.

In this video we will take a look at how to tackle one of the biggest problems in trading. And that is the dilemma of how to act when the signal reverses. After all, many traders believe that the moment a signal reverses is the right time to close all open positions and open a new position in the opposite direction. In fact, there are strategies based on this idea, but you don’t necessarily have to do it this way. This is the new Platinum System.   The current version here in the video is a reverse engineered version from MQL5 to MQL4. And it’s based on the opposite principle, which is the idea that a position that’s opened has only one purpose, and that’s to make a profit. And that’s why in this case we don’t close the position when the signal reverses. In fact, the entry is not the most important thing in a trading system. Of course, you need a defined entry and without an entry we would not be able to define clear rules. But the entry point does not necessarily always have to lead in the right direction in order to create a profitable system. The problem with this is that in phases like now, when you see a whole lot of open positions, you always get the question: should I close my position now?   Is the loss too big or should I continue? Here in the example we are just with a 10,000 € account and the value for the equity has fallen below 9900 €. This maybe goes much deeper in a longer drawdown. And the longer such a situation lasts, the more uncertain we become as traders and ask ourselves the question: How should I react now? Should I realize the loss or should I hope that everything will turn around? In the last week alone I have been asked this question twice and therefore I would like to present my idea. And that is simply to test until you are sure how you want to behave in a specific case. In a soccer game there are lines, there are referees and there are goals. A soccer game usually lasts 90 minutes.   And the team that has scored the most valid goals at the end of the period is the winner. Such rules are simply necessary so that you can even determine whether a result looks good or bad and whether you want to continue or not. After all, you will rarely see in a soccer match that the players leave the field after conceding three goals because, after all, the whole thing is no longer worthwhile. So if you feel in trading that your results just don’t match what you thought they would, it’s usually due to a few simple things.   Problem number 1: You haven’t defined any rules. That means you show up to a soccer game in field hockey gear and with a tennis racket.   Problem number 2: Your account is too big. The moment you start to question whether your account will survive the next night and you can’t sleep because of it, it’s pretty certain that your account size is too high to let you continue to sleep well in the future.   Problem number 3: You depend on making profits. If you already have a clear idea in your head of what should happen next now, the opposite will almost certainly happen.   But for all of these problems, there is also a corresponding solution. And this solution can sometimes look like simply waiting long enough. In the meantime, our system has already reached February and little has changed in the situation. This can look much worse in real time and be much more emotionally stressful than you have here in such a strategy test. And that’s exactly why it’s important to use such strategy tests extensively beforehand, in order to know how to behave afterwards in the real situation. Because this is exactly where I am right now with my Platinum System. The Euro US Dollar has changed direction.   We have a small drawdown and now you have to ask yourself the question: Do I still want to trade this system next week, next month and next year? The only way to answer that satisfactorily for me is to do sufficient testing and define rules before I get into the situation.

TO THE STATISTICS   You can now evaluate and dissect every component of the new $1,000 Platin Group System because I published the statistics on the Platinsystem.org website. Our initial Platin System trading account has been active for a few weeks at this point. We have already surpassed the 3% profit mark and are getting close to the $350 profit threshold. I currently have three streaming servers running that automatically live-trade the $1,000 Platin Group System on Youtube for three distinct accounts thanks to a suggestion from a member called Rafael from Brazil. You may find them on my MQL4 Tutorial, MQL5 Tutorial, and Algorithmic Trading System.com YouTube channels. Recently, I discovered a flaw in the system that resulted in a problem when I changed anything in the source code.   The system was unable to handle positions that had been opened before it was resumed during live operation, which was the cause. That only shows up when you are trading live because it is not taking place when you are testing your strategies. And for this reason, it’s crucial to not just rely on the outcomes of strategy tests. So until a system is ready to enter beta stage, I typically do strategy tests on demo accounts.   The system then is used on a real money account in normal operation using so-called Cent accounts, which I like. And once everything is operating as it should, scaling up an account is never an issue, as I frequently tell my clients. But I go about it differently this time. And the reason is because one of the premium course participants came up with a system that he wanted me to look into since he believed the positive outcomes were due to a special entry. I didn’t think that, so I modified the entrance signal to test if the outcomes would still be favorable. And what happened? That being the case,   I disassembled the entire system and began to develop my own adaptation of the strategy. The Platin System’s initial Alpha version was completed about 3 months later, and as of this writing, three systems are now in the beta stage. Since you can review the data on Platinsystem.org, you can decide if this is something you might want to trade after looking at the specifics. You can view specifics about each trade by clicking on the statistics sheet. Additionally, the system typically experiences very few drawdowns, and the typical trade lasts only a few hours. If you are already a member of the Premium Course, please let me know what you think of the current setup. I intend to give those members who have what it takes to succeed an upgrade.   On the website, you may still sign up to join a premium course if you want to. Although I have to admit that it is an expensive solution because it includes consulting and a few things that I have never offered before, I have taken the sales page for the RobotTradingSystem offline to devote that time to the new Platinum group, which might be interesting for some existing members. Collaboration is important, so Rafael, if you watch this video and are interested in joining the Platin Group, I have a discount code for you. I’m still looking for the initial email and attachment that started it all in the spring so I can thank the premium member who helped me to get the idea. However, I wanted you to be able to look at the embedded statistics on PlatinSystem.org since I believe you will get some useful new information. I look forward to your response, see you in the upcoming video.