Daniel Cherry / Profile

I am an ex role-playing, football supporting, computer programming, project manager father of two who decided to live the dream and become a trader – boy, it’s tough. Here is a bit about me and how myTraderTools came about.

During my trading carer my trading style has altered over time, but has mainly been over shorter timeframes, anywhere between 30 minutes and 1 minute intervals. I have had all the problems of the new trader and made and still make the same mistakes, but during this journey I realised that I absolutely hate doing the same thing over and over again, such as calculating and recalculating my position size, waiting for the market to reach my entry level as your broker won’t let you place a working order there, re-sizing and modifying an existing order and using Meta Trader 4 Alerts. In fact to me, I found some of these simple but laborious tasks so tedious that it was having a negative influence on my trading. Surely, most of this can be made simpler and automated as much as possible.

My philosophy is simple, why manually repeat something over and over again, when these actions can be automated.

My first problem was sizing my position, it seemed to take an age (two minutes repeated too many times is far too long for me). Looking around the internet, I just couldn’t see any position size calculator that satisfied my requirements. They either required manual price entry onto a spread sheet or web form (too time consuming) or were very cumbersome and unintuitive tools to apply to my chart. Both solutions I found unsatisfactory, so I decided to fall back on something I am really good at and make my own.

So that’s what I set out to do, to take a pause from live trading and develop professional quality intuitive trader tools that I needed for myself.

My first trader tool was a position size calculator (myPosition), which needed to satisfy my requirements. Obviously it needed to calculate my position size, but it had to be a lot more. It had to be responsive, intuitive and super-fast to use, it had to show my entry and stop locations and show where my minimum target would be based on my Risk Reward ratio. It must take into account the spread - both for calculating the Risk Reward ratio (one for entry and one for exit) and the actual entry and exit price (are we entering on the Bid or Ask price?). Finally it needed to look good on my chart. The result I was really pleased with, but I realised it was not the finished product yet.

Great, I thought, I now know the position size, but I want to enter fast, really fast, so my next trader tool was developed, myEntry. This again brought new challenges. First, it must use what we already have developed so it had to interact with myPosition for sizing and entry and exit prices. It must be able to enter Limit or Stop orders and to intelligently work out which one to use. It must be able to enter at Market if entry was too close to current price for the broker to allow. It should enter a two part position and enter on the bid or ask price depending on whether we are buying or selling and like all my tools, it must be simple to use, highly efficient and fast. So my second trader tool was created. But I couldn’t stop there.

I needed an interface that would bind these tools together, to make their operation super usable and would give me information on what they were currently doing, so my next tool was developed, myToolBar, an interface on Metatrder – which is probably the most important tool I have created yet. Once this was created it allowed me to add extra functionality to myPosition and myEntry such as deleting or modifying an order. It also and gave me a platform for the future development of my tools and turned myTraderTools into a modular toolset.

Finally, the last tool I created was a price alert, myAlert. I just didn’t like the current alert method in Metatrader and I found third party ones did not do want I wanted to - mainly like being super quick and easy to use, to alert on current or close price and to send notifications to my smart phone to avoid excessive screen time.

Trading is my passion and a journey, and one that I am still traveling, but whilst upon it I am developing trader tools for me that you may want to use too.