EA circuit breaker

 

What types of coding (fail safes) should be included in a ea to prevent it from draining an account from opening too many trades? It is possible for an ea to open hundreds of trades in a second if something was coded incorrectly. So, what type of coding should be included to prevent this from happening? Maybe something like if more than X amount of trades are placed then the ea is prevented from opening more trades. How many fail safes should an ea have???

Also, how long should an ea be tested before it is used live?

Thanks for the replies.

 
mql4newbie2059:

What types of coding (fail safes) should be included in a ea to prevent it from draining an account from opening too many trades? It is possible for an ea to open hundreds of trades in a second if something was coded incorrectly. So, what type of coding should be included to prevent this from happening? Maybe something like if more than X amount of trades are placed then the ea is prevented from opening more trades. How many fail safes should an ea have???

Also, how long should an ea be tested before it is used live?

Thanks for the replies.


There are no clear-cut answers to your questions, except; Yes it is possible for an EA to open hundreds of trades. And yes an EA can be coded to limit the number of open trades. 

You have to study MQL, read the articles. Otherwise you have no means to interpret any advice given. 

 

Thanks for the reply. I also would like to know what is the best way to learn MQL4. Should the manual be read from beginning to end or should select sections only be read.

 
mql4newbie2059:

Thanks for the reply. I also would like to know what is the best way to learn MQL4. Should the manual be read from beginning to end or should select sections only be read.

Try a book! It may be easier to follow and learn step-by-step:

Forum on trading, automated trading systems and testing trading strategies

Something Interesting to Read

Sergey Golubev, 2017.09.16 05:40

Expert Advisor Programming for MetaTrader 4


This book will teach you the following concepts:

  • The basic of the MLQ4 language, including variables and data types, operations, conditional and loop operators, functions, classes and objects, event handlers and more.
  • Place, modify and close market and pending orders.
  • Add a stop loss and/or take profit price to an individual order, or to multiple orders.
  • Close orders individually or by order type.
  • Get a total of all currently opened orders.
  • Work with OHLC bar data and locate basic candlestick patterns.
  • Find the highest high and lowest low of recent bars.
  • Work with MetaTrader’s built-in indicators, as well as custom indicators.
  • Add a trailing stop or break even stop feature to an expert advisor.
  • Use money management and lot size verification techniques.
  • Add a flexible trading timer to an expert advisor.
  • Construct several types of trading systems, including trend, counter-trend and breakout systems.
  • Add alert, emails, sounds and other notifications.
  • Add and manipulate chart objects.
  • Read and write to CSV files.
  • Construct basic indicators, scripts and libraries.
  • Learn how to effective debug your programs, and use the Strategy Tester to test your strategies.

All of the source code in this book is available for download, including an expert advisor framework that allows you to build robust and fully-featured expert advisors with minimal effort.

Forum on trading, automated trading systems and testing trading strategies

Something Interesting to Read

Sergey Golubev, 2017.09.16 05:48

Expert Advisor Programming for MetaTrader 5


This book will teach you the following concepts:

  • Learn the basics of MQL5, including variables and data types, operators, functions, event handlers, and object-oriented programming.
  • Place, modify and close market and pending orders.
  • Calculate, verify and add stop loss and take profit prices to an open position.
  • Add a flexible trailing stop and/or break even stop to your strategy.
  • Manage your trade risk with money management.
  • Use pending orders to scale in and out of positions.
  • Use price, time and indicator data in your expert advisors.
  • Control program execution by trading on new bar open, and add flexible trade timers to your strategies.
  • Walk through the creation of several basic trading strategies from start to finish.
  • Inform the user with dialog boxes, email alerts, mobile notifications and sounds.
  • Draw trend lines, arrows and text labels on the chart.
  • Read and write data to CSV files.
  • Learn the basics of creating indicators, scripts and libraries in MetaEditor.
  • Debug, test and optimize your trading strategy.
  • And much more!

Whether you’re an experienced programmer moving from MQL4, or a novice just starting with MQL5, this book will give you the foundation to quickly program fully-featured and robust trading systems.