MQL5 ADVANCED: Code & Test a News EA & News Filter in MQL5

News are the daily fuel for fear and greed in our daily lives. News determine how we plan for our future and anticipate our fortunes or peril. The informed are always safe, that’s the law of the jungle.

The forex market is a beast fueled by nothing other than fear and greed. It represents the true nature of human behavior. It’s a competitive jungle where the fittest are poised to survive. It’s a chamber of fortunes and pain, married to one another like yin and Yang.

Because news promotes behaviors of fear and greed, it is news that drives chaos and volatility in the forex market. It is news that causes irrational behavior of the markets and it is news that causes the markets to trend. Without news, there would be no volatility which attracts investors to the forex market, there would be no greed that causes buying and no fear that causes selling. Markets would stagger and stagnate for long periods, losing their appeal as opportunity makers.

News that affects the forex market is collected within the Economic calendar. For algorithmic traders, reliable and timely news is paramount and this is where the MQL5 economic calendar shines. This is mainly because even though economic data websites are everywhere, integrating them correctly into your Expert Advisors (EAs) can be very challenging.

MQL5's calendar resides within the MetaTrader platform itself. This eliminates the need for external data feeds, ensuring seamless integration and minimal latency. Your EA receives economic event updates directly, allowing for near-instantaneous responses to market shifts triggered by data releases.

Also the MQL5’s economic calendar offers a dedicated set of functions specifically designed for EAs. These functions allow you to efficiently query the calendar for upcoming events, filter by specific data types (interest rates, employment figures, etc.),and extract crucial details like release time and forecast values. This streamlined approach saves you the hassle of parsing external website data, ensuring your EA focuses its processing power on analysis and trade execution.

By relying solely on MQL5's internal calendar, you eliminate the potential security risks associated with external data sources. Third-party websites can be susceptible to hacking or manipulation, which could introduce errors or misleading information into your EA's decision-making process. MQL5's secure environment mitigates these risks, ensuring the integrity of the data your EA uses.

In this course, we shall start by creating a news filter which basically reduces the risk of radical volatility caused by news releases in mean reversion strategies which suffer great losses in biased markets. In creating the news filter, we shall focus on how to get past economic data, future economic data and how to access particular elements like news values from the data.

We shall then code a script that collects past news data and stores it into a csv file. We shall then code an expert advisor that takes data from the stored news csv file and enters trades based on it in the strategy tester, allowing us to test our trading ideas and strategies based on news events using the Metatrader strategy tester. We shall finally adapt our tested strategy to live market trading so that it can be implemented for live news events.

For those that are still finding their way with MQL5, as long as you understand the basics of MQL5, this course is for you. We will patiently guide you through every step of the strategy development process and walk you through every line of code we shall craft. Hopefully, by the end of the course, you will have gained the necessary skills to code similar trading strategies and be able to appreciate how manipulating News data can improve your strategies.

So hit hard on that enroll button now and join me in this incredible journey of coding a News trading filter and news associated trading strategies.