How to limit the trading time of Forex expert advisors

You have probably noticed that transactions on certain days or even hours bring a loss when trading using experts advisors. For example, they can be deals on Friday night, the result of which, when carried over the weekend, is often unpredictable. What to do? Manually, turn on and off the Expert Advisor? It’s not very convenient, and we are all people - you can just forget to do it.

The solution of the problem is the Trade Scheduler auxiliary adviser, which allows you to limit the time of work of other experts according to the schedule set by the trader. For example, you can limit the trading of robots from 7 to 11 hours on Monday. This development is from our friends from ArgoLab and today we will get acquainted with it in detail.

Statistical Analysis

Before you limit the work of an adviser, you must first determine at what time the strategy works badly. To do this, you can use one of the monitoring services, such as Myfxbook, which gives detailed statistics of the trade in time. In order for the analysis to be reliable, it is desirable to have a trading statistics at least for three months.

So, for beginners, you need to start monitoring on Myfxbook. There is a detailed instruction on how to do this. For example, take the monitoring of the Forex Hunter advisor.

Also, you can download a report from the Strategy Tester. This is primarily necessary for those who do not yet have a sufficient amount of history on a real account but have a robot that can be tested in a tester. There is also a separate article on how to do it.

Further, after the monitoring was downloaded and processed, go to the extended statistics section, to the “Daily” tab. Here you can see the number of profitable and unprofitable trades on the days of the week. As we see, on Wednesday and Friday the largest relative numbers of unprofitable trades are 77% and 78%, respectively. This means that the state of the market these days is not suitable for this strategy, the forecasts are less accurate and the advisor loses money. To improve the efficiency of an automatic strategy, it is wise to remove these days from trading.

Then we look at the statistics by the clock (“Hourly”). The arrows in the screenshot indicate the hours with the largest number of unprofitable trades. In addition, during the night period (mainly Asian session), transactions are not only much less than during the day, but the quality of entries is far from the best.

So, if we block the work of the adviser on Wednesday and Friday, leaving work on the remaining days from 11 to 19 hours, the result is guaranteed to improve.

The advisor’s settings for the changes in this example will look like this:

Installing and settings

The installation of the Expert Advisor takes place in the standard way. Open the terminal data directory through the File - Open Data Folder, and go to the MQL4 - Experts directory. Here we copy the previously downloaded EA file with the “.ex4” extension. Restart the terminal for the Expert Advisor to appear in the Navigator window.

In the settings, you need to specify the time of work according to the days of the week. Three input parameters are provided for each day. The first is responsible for enabling/disabling trading on a specific day, the second - for the time of the start of trade, the third - the time of the end of a trade. Time can be specified to the precision of minutes.

The optional CloseBeforeSwitchOFF parameter is responsible for closing all positions just before the auto trade is turned off. In total, the parameter can have three values: No - the deals are not closed; CloseAllProfitable - only profitable ones are closed; CloseAll - exit from all open deals. The slip parameter is responsible for maximum slippage.

Do not forget to allow auto-trade and import functions from DLL libraries.

Time should be specified, being guided by the terminal time, which is displayed in the header of the “Market Watch” window. It’s also the time of your broker.

Also, do not try to install multiple instances of the Expert Advisor on the same account - only one instance is sufficient. Otherwise, none of them will work properly.

Conclusion

Limiting working time is the easiest and most effective way to improve your EA performance. For example, if the adviser stably merges with 4 to 8, then the market has a different pattern, which the robot cannot handle. Simply not trading in this period, you increase the overall profitability and unload the deposit from excess transactions.