Wait time between trades

I am looking for suggestions/opinions on how to make sure that once an order is closed the EA waits 'x' amount of time before opening another order.

Actual code not necessary, just concept wise explanation. I will do my own coding.

Any input appreciated.

Thanks!

On bberry, more later:

Iterate closed orders and check last ordercloseddate.

Edit: Okay, now on a full sized keyboard...

The easy way to do it is to use a variable to keep track of the last opened ticket and see if it's been closed by checking OrderCloseTime(...). This is fine for backtesting and such, but not the best idea for an EA you plan to use live. The reason is that this is now an EA that must maintain state. Meaning, if you close your MetaTrader platform and reopen it, it has to "know" about stuff that happened during the previous session(s). If you used a variable, that information would be lost.

If you store the ticket number in a global variable(using GlobalVariableSet(...) & GlobalVariableGet(...)) or figure out which ticket was closed last by iterating OrdersHistoryTotal() you're not going to run into this problem.

Thank you tesla,

That is the direction I was going in by instinct.

Here is what i was thinking...

****************************
****************************
::: First pass through :::

Enter market: open oder and tag a global variable [GlobalVariableSet(...)] with the ticket number of that order

------------------------------------------
--- time goes by and the order is closed ---
------------------------------------------

::: Next pass through :::

OrderSelect from History by ticket using the global variable [GlobalVariableGet(...)] that was set in the first pass through.

If CurrentTime() is less than (OrderCloseTime()+300) /*five minutes?*/
then
bool notlongenough=true;

if notlongenough=true then there will be no trade.

******************************************
******************************************

Does that make sense to you?

Makes sense to me.

One thing to watch out for: if the ticket hasn't been closed, OrderCloseTime() will return 0. TimeCurrent() will be greater than OrderCloseTime() +300 and you'll end up opening multiple orders.

Understood. Thanks! I will make sure (OrderCloseTime() != 0)

I want to know if you could please write this logic in mql4 language, so that i can use the method you recommended in my EA,
thanks a lot