Building Your First Forex Trading Bot with MQL4: A Practical Guide

Why Automate Your Trading? Manual trading is emotional. You hesitate, you revenge-trade, you close winners too early. A well-coded Expert Advisor (EA) follows rules without flinching. In this guide, I'll walk through building a simple but functional moving average crossover EA in MQL4 — the language behind MetaTrader 4, still the most widely used retail forex platform. The Strategy We'll implement a dual moving average crossover : Buy when the fast MA crosses above the slow MA Sell when the fast MA crosses below the slow MA One position at a time, with a fixed stop loss and take profit Simple? Yes. But this foundation teaches you 90% of what you need for more complex strategies. The Code //+------------------------------------------------------------------+ //| MA_Cross_EA.mq4 | //| A simple moving average crossover Expert Advisor | //+------------------------------------------------------------------+ #property strict // Input parameters input int FastMA_Period = 10 ; // Fast MA perio