Trading signals

On the previous page (Indicators) we added all indicators for the EA. If you want to edit your indicators, you simply go back and adjust your indicator's parameters. Next, you can create the trading signals ('signals') you want to use for the opening or closing of an order. A signal is a group of conditions which have to be met before an order is opened or closed.

Get started

Your EA has 4 signal types.

Open Buy
Open Sell
Close Buy
Close Sell

Signals are a very powerful tool to create almost any open and close logic you can think of. Creating a signal may seem quite difficult in the beginning, but we believe that anyone can learn it quickly. So please be persistent when learning how to create signals. You can always reach out to us if you don't know how to proceed after reading the information on this page. Even when you think the signal editor is too limited, please reach out to us and we can show you how you can create your signal, as we have a lot of experience in solving complex scneario's. Just use the contact form , or mail us on .

Enable or Disable a signal

You can enable or disable a signal by clicking on the options button and select Enable/Disable. When your signal is disabled it will not be included in the generated EA (mql or compiled). The EA needs at least one enabled Open Buy or Open Sell signal to open any orders automatically. It's possible to leave both Open signals disabled if you plan on manually opening your orders.

Enabled signals appear normal with a vertical blue bar in front of the signal name.
Disabled signals are grayed out with a vertical gray bar in front of the signal name.

Copy and Paste a signal

Open the options menu to Copy a signal to the other signal(s). A common scenario is that you start by creating the Open Buy Signal. When ready, you may want to copy the Open Buy signal to the Close Sell signal and you may want to copy the Open Sell signal to the Close Buy signal. This way the open order will reverse from a buy order, to a sell order and vice versa. There are 2 ways to copy your signal: by copying the signal on the EA overview page and by using Move | Cut-Copy-Paste in the signal editor.

Open the options menu for a particular signal.
Click Copy To.
Choose signal to which you want to copy your signal.
Click Copy.

copy and paste a trading signal — Click the option button to copy a signal

Edit a signal

Click on a signal that you would like to edit. This will open the signal editor. If you started your EA based on a template then your signals may already contain some conditions. Other signals may be empty and so only contain an empty root group. If that's the case, start by adding conditions to your signal.

Order Type

Once you have opened the signal editor, you can choose from the following order types:

Market order: sends an order to the broker which is requested to be filled at the current price.
Limit order: sends a pending order to the broker, but requests a better price. The order is filled at some time in the future if the order can be filled for the requested price and before the order expires.
Stop order: sends a pending order to the broker, but requests the price to reach a target price first. The order is filled at some time in the future if the order can be filled for the requested price and before the order expires.

If a market order is selected, the condition When the order is sent to the broker must be configured. If a pending order is selected (Limit order or Stop order), both the condition When the order is sent to the broker and the Price at which the order is requested to be filled must be entered.

order type at price — Pending orders have extra configuration options, like the 'At price' target price.

ANY | ALL Root Group

After you've selected your order type, it's time to configure your conditions. You'll see the conditions start with a root group at the top. The root group gives you a choise between ANY/ALL. This option effects all conditions that are directly in this Group.

ANY: Only one of the conditions has to be met for the signal to activate.
ALL: All of the conditions have to be met for the signal to activate.

Start building your condition(s) from this root Group.

root logical operator — A signal has 1 root ANY/ALL Group

Add condition

Open the options menu of a ANY | ALL group and select Add Condition. After you click Add Condition a simple condition will be added.

A condition is an expression with a Left-Hand side, an operator and a right Right-Hand side. By default, the Left- and Right-handside operands are indicators. The indicators you've added to your EA will appear here. You can replace the Indicator with a Function (Bid, Ask, Stoploss etc) or a constant value.

condition added — A simple condition with default Indicator values has been added. ADX is the name of the indicator. Main is the name of the MODE. S0 is the Shift (Bar) on which the indicator will be calculated.

Toggle Indicator, Function or Constant

You can toggle between an indicator, function or constant. Click on the element you would like to edit and a popup window will appear.

Click on Indicator to access the indicators you have added to your EA.
Click on Function to access functions like ask, bid, hour, minute etc.
Click on Constant to add a constant value. The default value is EMPTY which represents a MetaTrader empty value, which is a long number (2147483647).

toggle between indicator, function and value. — Toggle between indicator, function and value.

Shift (Bar)

For each indicator you use in your condition you have to select the Shift you want to use. By doing this, you specify which bar's value (of the indicator) you want to use.

Shift (Bar): 0 - The current bar
Shift (Bar): 1 - The previous bar
Shift (Bar): 2 - The bar before the previous bar, etc.

Select on which bar the indicator will be calculated — Select which bar's value you want to use.

Operator

There are three operator categories:

Comparison
Crossover
Mathematical

Each category contains different operators. Depending on the context certain operator categories may not be available. Click here for a full list of available operators.

toggle between Logical, Comparison, Crossover and Arithmetic operators — List of operators can vary based on context.

Add Advanced Condition

If a simpel Condition does not meet your requirements you can add a Advanced Condition.

add advanced condtion — Add an **Advanced Condition**

An Advanced Condition can contain various elements.

Operation
Value
Mathematical Operator

The Advanced Condition supports all the requirements you may have. Here you can apply complex mathematical operations if needed.

advanced condition example — An example of an Advanced Condition. The condition checks if the Ask (price) went above the midpoint between the previous day's High and Low. This midpoint is calculated by adding the Low and the High and deviding the result by 2.

When you are done with the Advanced Condition it can be collapsed. A summary of your condition will be shown, this will help you to keep a good overview of your signal.

Add Group Any/All

You can add a nested Group of Conditions. Click on Add Group.

remove node — Add a Group of conditions.

Here you can add more Condtions, Advanced Conditions or another nested Group.

Remove node

You can remove a node by selecting "Remove" under options. The root Group (Any/All) can never be removed. Nested Groups can be removed.

Move | Cut-Copy-Paste

There are 2 ways to move elements.

Move a condition Up/Down

Cut and Paste

Copy and Paste

Move a node within its container (Group or Advanced Condition) by opening the options menu. Click on Move Up or Move Down to move the element Up or Down in order.

If you need to move a node to another container (Group or Advanced Condition), open the options menu and select Cut. The interface will be blocked for editing and you will be presented with options to paste your node. Click on the Paste button where you would like to move this item. The item will be moved to this location. Alternatively, you can use Copy instead of Cut to duplicate the node.

paste node — Click on the Paste button to move the Condition to that location. Click cancel to cancel this Cut or Copy action.

Invert a signal

Open the options menu of the root group to invert a signal. A common scenario is that you start by creating the Open Buy Signal. When ready, you will want to create the Open Sell signal, which is the same as the Open Buy signal, but then Inverted. To do so, click the Invert button on the Open Sell signal after you copied the signal from the Open Buy signal. Make sure that you verify that the inverted signal is what you expect it to be.

invert a trading signal — Click the option button to invert the selected signal.

Invalid signals

When you are building signals you can create a signal that is invalid. Invalid signals cannot be saved. You know that your signal is invalid when you see the exclamation mark with an error message in the top summary box.

an invalid signal — A Advanced condition is missing a Left-Hand and Right-hand side operand. Add those elements to fix this error.

Nested conditions

You can make signals as complex as you would like. To easily understand how signals work, a good strategy is to divide them into groups. Each group results in conditions being met or not-met.

complex signal — Divide signals into groups. We have got 2 blue conditions in the root group and 2 green conditions in the nested ANY/ALL group. Each group is either met or not met. The root group is an ALL group and therefore both blue conditions must be met, and 1 condition out of the green nested group must be met. The reason 1 out of 2 green conditions must be met because it is an ANY group.

Operators

The signal editor enables you with a set of well known operators. We've added a set of special crossover operators to make things easier.

Symbol	Name	Category
	Cross	Crossover
	Up Cross	Crossover
	Down Cross	Crossover
==	Equal	Comparison
!=	Not Equal	Comparison
>=	Above or Equal	Comparison
<=	Below or Equal	Comparison
>	Above	Comparison
<	Below	Comparison
+	Add	Mathematical
-	Substract	Mathematical
/	Divide	Mathematical
*	Multiply	Mathematical
%	Modulo	Mathematical

Cross

Use this operator if the direction of the crossover does not matter.

Up Cross

Use this operator if the direction crosses over from below (Up Cross).

Down Cross

Use this operator if the direction crosses over from above (Down Cross).

Equal

Comparison operator. Returns true if both sides of the expression are equal.

Not Equal

Comparison operator. Condition is met if both sides of the condition are not equal.

Above Or Equal

Comparison operator. Condition is met if the left side of the condition is above or equal to the right side of the condition.

Below Or Equal

Comparison operator. Condition is met if the left side of the condition is below or equal to the right side of the condition.

Above

Comparison operator. Condition is met if the left side of the condition is above the right side of the condition.

Below

Comparison operator. Condition is met if the left side of the condition is below the right side of the condition.

Add

Use this operator to add numbers.

add example — If the value of indicator MA7 is above MA30 + 100, the condition is met.

Substract

Use this operator to substract numbers.

subscract example — If the value of indicator MA7 is above MA30 - 100, the condition is met.

Divide

Use this operator to divide numbers.

devide example — If the value of indicator MA30 divided by 0.75 is above than the value of MA7, the condition is met.

Multiply

Use this operator to multiply numbers.

Modulo

Returns the remainder after a division.

Functions

The signal editor provides the flexibility to apply various functions when specifying your conditions. Below is a description of the available functions.

Price

The price category of functions give information about the current price, based on your symbol.

Ask: the current price requested by your broker.
Bid: the current price offered by your broker.
Pip: the value of 1 pip. For EURUSD this is 0.0001.

Account

The account category of functions give information about your account.

Balance: the current balance of your account.
Equity: the current equity (balance + floating profit(s)) of your account.

Date

The Date category of functions give information about the date- and time functions.

Day of month: a number between 1 and 31. Each month, it begins with the value 1 and ends with a number between 28 and 31, depending on the length of the month.
Day of week: a number between 1 (Monday) and 7 (Sunday).
Day of year: a number between 1 (1st of January) and 365 or 366 (31st of December).
Hour: a number between 0 (0 am) and 23 (11 pm).
Minutes: a number between 0 and 59.
Month of year: a number between 1 and 12.
Seconds: a number between 0 and 59.

Order

The Order category of functions give information about open orders.

No. of open orders: the total number of currently open orders (buy and sell).
No. open buy orders: the total number of currently open buy orders.
No. open sell orders: the total number of currently open sell orders.
Open price: the price at which the order was opened. When used in the context of a signal, it's the last buy or sell order (depending on type of signal). When used in the context of a TP/ SL module, it's the order being evaluated.
Open price highest: the highest open price price at which any open order was opened.
Open price highest buy: the highest open price price at which any open buy order was opened.
Open price highest sell: the highest open price price at which any open sell order was opened.
Open price lowest: the lowest open price price at which any open order was opened.
Open price lowest buy: the lowest open price price at which any open buy order was opened.
Open price lowest sell: the lowest open price price at which any open sell order was opened.
Open price newest: the price at which the newest open order was opened.
Open price newest buy: the price at which the newest buy open order was opened.
Open price newest sell: the price at which the newest sell open order was opened.
Open price oldest: the price at which the oldest open order was opened.
Open price oldest buy: the price at which the oldest buy open order was opened.
Open price oldest sell: the price at which the oldest sell open order was opened.
Open price closed: the price at which the most recent closed order was opened.
Open price closed buy: the price at which the most recent closed buy order was opened.
Open price closed sell: the price at which the most recent closed sell order was opened.
Close price: the price at which the most recent closed order was closed.
Close price buy: the price at which the most recent closed buy order was closed.
Close price sell: the price at which the most recent closed sell order was closed.
Open seconds: the duration, in seconds, since the order was opened. When used in the context of a signal, it's the last buy or sell order (depending on type of signal). When used in the context of a TP/ SL module, it's the order being evaluated.
Open seconds newest: the duration, in seconds, since the newest open order was opened.
Open seconds newest buy: the duration, in seconds, since the newest open buy order was opened.
Open seconds newest sell: the duration, in seconds, since the newest open sell order was opened.
Closed seconds: the duration, in seconds, since the last closed order was closed.
Closed seconds buy: the duration, in seconds, since the last closed buy order was closed.
Closed seconds sell: the duration, in seconds, since the last closed sell order was closed.
Profit open orders money: the total amount of profit of all open orders in account currency.
Profit open orders pips: the total amount of profit of all open orders in pips.
Stop loss: the closest stop loss value set for the order. When used in the context of a signal, it's the last buy or sell order (depending on type of signal). When used in the context of a TP/ SL module, it's the order being evaluated. If no stop loss value is set for the order, it defaults to the Empty value, represented by a long number (2147483647).
Stop loss newest: the closest stop loss value set for the newest open order.
Stop loss newest buy: the closest stop loss value set for the newest open buy order.
Stop loss newest sell: the closest stop loss value set for the newest open sell order.
Stop loss oldest: the closest stop loss value set for the oldest open order.
Stop loss oldest buy: the closest stop loss value set for the oldest open buy order.
Stop loss oldest sell: the closest stop loss value set for the oldest open sell order.
Take profit: the closest target profit set for the order. When used in the context of a signal, it's the last buy or sell order (depending on type of signal). When used in the context of a TP/ SL module, it's the order being evaluated. If no take profit value is set for the order, it defaults to the Empty value, represented by a long number (2147483647).
Take profit newest: the closest take profit value set for the newest open order.
Take profit newest buy: the closest take profit value set for the newest open buy order.
Take profit newest sell: the closest take profit value set for the newest open sell order.
Take profit oldest: the closest take profit value set for the oldest open order.
Take profit oldest buy: the closest take profit value set for the oldest open buy order.
Take profit oldest sell: the closest take profit value set for the oldest open sell order.

Next: Modules