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I am learning the MetaTrader platform and MQ4 so I can code indicators and strategies (EAs) in MT. I don't have any plans to trade Forex in MT any time soon, but that's an option. I'm mainly doing it to participate in the MT programming community and work on some assignments I've been given from some customers, the first one being converting a TradeStation strategy to MQ4.
Being a long-time NinjaTrader user/programmer (almost 1 yr now), I'll be posting some of the things I learn on the way. This may be boring to MT pros but other n00bs may find it useful. I also look forward to any tips and advice from others more knowledgeable than myself.
The first thing that I encountered that was somewhat confusing was how MT uses time. All times in MT are in Eastern European time (EET) and I have to think of everything in terms of that time zone.
Also, when I was back testing an EA I set the historical dates in Strategy Tester for testing to just test March 2010. Then I wanted to test back to March 2009 but I could never get any data past my original time frame, I could never get more than 1 month of data. I am using a version of MT distributed by Peregrine (PFG) and it appear I can only get 1mo of historical data from them. I then stumbled upon the History Center (F2) where I can download historical data for all of the pairs. I pressed "Download", got a warning that the data comes from MetaTrader's servers and not PFG's, then waited a few minutes. I'm not sure how much data I have now but I had no problem testing 1yr back. So for kicks I tried going back to March 1999 and it took trades all the way as far back as October 1999, so I'm not sure if that's where my data ends or it's some other limit.
Also, I learned that one way to make sure you can get more bars in your charts is to increase the max bars settings in Tools | Options | Charts to the highest number possible (a bunch of "9"s). See screen shot. It seems like this would be one of the first settings you should change when you install MT.
You can export EA results into a nice HTML file (attached). Not as nice as TradeStation's but still helpful.
Also, one thing that was different is that the times on the charts are the time the bar opens, whereas in NT it is the time the bar closes (prints). Most other trading platforms I've used (thinkorswim, TradeStation) do it the same way as MT so perhaps Ninja is the weirdo here.
shodson, when you increase the bars in the chart to huge figures you might find it starts to chew up a lot of RAM and custom indicators take a long time to load.
In my opinion it's better to keep the history number high and the chart number low.
