Metatrader is the most common platform for Forex trading.
Metatrader is free platform for trading, and that is the reason why it is used in this lecture. In this article Petko Aleksandrov, Head mentor at EA Forex Academy will demonstrate to you the basics for metatrader. This lecture is part of the course Automated Forex trading+ 99 Expert Advisors, where the mentor shares 99 Expert Advisors for Forex trading every new month.
I start with the first lecture in the course.
I will dedicate it for the very newbie traders that are just starting, that don’t have any experience in trading. And I will show the most important things in trading with Metatrader, with algorithmic trading. You will see the basic specifications and terminology that you need to know.
But of course I’m not going into any theories and hard things to remember. I will just show you the very, very practical thing what you need to know before start trading.
The platform that I have opened in front of me is called Metatrader:
This is one of the most common platforms among the brokers nowadays. For the clients, for us – the traders it comes for free. The brokers are paying to the MetaQuotes company which has developed the Metatrader. And the brokers are offering it to the clients, the traders for free.
So, we don’t need to pay using the platform.
What makes this platform different from the web based platforms, is that we can attach the Expert Advisors to the trading chart and they will trade for us.
What is Expert Advisor in Metatrader?
I have written one article actually recently about it. Actually you can find many of my articles for free and there are videos inside. If you go to EA blog you can see here the article.
You can see the recent one is Expert Advisor- the reality and there is video free in YouTube and there is the article below. And you can read more about it and get familiar with the algorithmic trading with the Expert Advisors:
Or you can have a look at the other articles that we have over here.
And we do our best to upload couple of articles every week. You have free access to it and you can read more about it.
Now, with simply words Expert Advisor is the automated strategy in Metatrader. When you have any trading strategy which opens the trades according to some indicators or conditions you can always automate this strategy. But here we don’t do this.
In this Automated Forex trading + 99 Expert Advisors course I will provide the Expert Advisors and I will just show you the whole process how we are generating strategies over the history data that we have. But the whole idea is that when we place Expert Advisor over the chart in Metatrader or the so called robot you can trade automatically without the need to stay in front of the computer and to execute the orders manually.
Now, what you have on the chart in Metatrader?
On the right side is the price and down is the time. If you take the cross here you can see at any moment what was exactly the price. There are some indicators here. They are just random indicators that came with the Metatrader.
These are the candles here, you can see these black and blue candles. You see four important values of each candlestick, this is:
- the opening
- the close
- the high
- the low
And when I put the mouse on the closing you can see the values exactly. Each one represents 15 minutes if we are on M15 chart. If I go to H1, each one candlestick will represent 1 hour
On the left side in Metatrader, what we have, is the market watch.
Here are all the symbols that we can trade with this broker. If you don’t see too many, you can right click, select show all. This will show all the symbols that your broker is offering. By dragging it over the chart you can open it or right click and chart window.
And here what we have are two columns- the bid and the ask, and the third one is the spread. You can actually hide it with right mouse again. But I prefer to see the spread at any moment.
The spread is the difference between the bid and the ask price. Normally, when we execute any order we buy on the ask price and we close on the bid price. And the other way around- when we sell, we sell on the bid price and when we close the position we close it on the ask price.
The spread is how the broker benefits. Of course, if it is not a market maker broker with metatrader. Now, you can see with this broker that I have chosen the spread for the currencies is very small below one pip.
What is the pip?
Here I will explain as well, the pips are the third and the fourth digit. If you see at GBPUSD I have a price of 1.4060-61. This 60, 61 these are the pips. And the last one, the fifth digit this is the point. Normally when we pronounce the price we say 1.4060. We don’t say the last digit:
And you should look for brokers that are having smaller spread and especially for the major currencies it should be not more than one pip. The other cost that we pay to the broker is the commission. But not all of the brokers have commission. For every trade opened they will charge you a very small fee.
But normally what happens is that the brokers that have commission, they have small spread. And the ones that don’t have commission are having a little bit higher spread. At the end of the day it’s one and the same thing. But look for the brokers that have very small spread.
This is very important when it comes to algorithmic trading in Metatrader. The other cost that we pay is the swap.
When you keep a position overnight if I open a trade today and it closes tomorrow I will be charged as well from the broker with a very small fee that they transfer to the position for the next day.
Now, here you see this columns type size, symbol price, top loss, Take Profit. This is where we will see in the course the open positions. And as well here you see the balance, this is a demo account that I have opened. Where later on in the course I will place the top Expert Advisors.
And here you have the balance, the equity and the margin in Metatrader:
When we have positions opened you will see your equity growing or going down according to your profit. And the margin is how much is blocked from your account when you are trading.
This is a leverage account, with leverage 1-2000 which means that I can open positions 200 times bigger than my balance. Of course, we don’t do that. We always trade with small risk from our account.
We don’t risk all of the money because obviously this is very risky.
The leverage allows us to trade bigger amounts but we don’t risk all of the money. We always try to stay with risk below 5% and even 2%. This is very, very important. Now, in this navigator is the place where we have our accounts.
For this course I have selected to use JFD broker. It’s a regulated broker, but don’t take it as a recommendation. It’s a personal choice with which broker you want to trade. Just look for the regulated brokers. And I would like to show you as well in our website if you go to the forum, there is a nice topic that says “How to recognize the scam brokers?”.:
Because nowadays there were many scam brokers and we have written this few months ago. And it turned out to be very useful for many traders because below you can read more that many people suffered actually from the scam brokers. And it’s really horrible because people are just losing money.
Take a minute to look at it, it’s very useful. You will know if you meet a scam broker actually how to recognize it. I’m not going to read it now but it’s very useful and of course if you have hard times to find a broker drop us an e-mail, write at
in**@ea************.com
and my team will help you with finding some good broker that is using metatrader.
And we will be very happy to protect you from the scam brokers. We have done it already actually with thousands of students which makes me very happy by the way. And one more time please don’t take this broker as a recommendation I just had to pick one in order to shoot this course and of course the other courses.
But the most important thing is to look for regulated broker with small spread, and using metatrader. Now, the other thing here you can see is the accounts of the broker that you have, the indicators. You can use, but we are not going to use any indicators to place over the chart and to trade with them because as we said we will be trading with the Expert Advisors.
Here is where we will place the 99 Expert Advisors in Metatrader:
And below is the scripts folder where you can use different scripts and I will show you how to use one and actually I will attach to the course one. And this script will help you to export the history data from the broker.
So, pretty much that’s it.
This is the Metatrader platform, many free videos over internet how to use it. That’s why I am not going in details how to use the Metatrader. Anyway, later on in the course you will see much more things about it and if you have questions of course you can always ask me. And in the course I will show you in another $10 000 of a demo account how we do the whole process of creating the strategies.
Thank you very much for reading.
For more algorithmic trading courses please visit: https://eatradingacademy.com/tracks/algorithmic-trading/.
The course is included also in our Packages.
