What does "repaint" mean?

Hi everyone,

This may seem like a very basic question to some people, but I'm new to MT4 (not new to trading however) and I hear people discuss "repaint" all the time and have no clue as to what it means. Can someone please clue me in?

Thanks kindly in advance for your responses.

Nancy

It means the indicator displayed changes it's data locatations in the past.

What that means is that a indicator that is doing this can look like it is highly accurate, when in fact the signal that was displayed when the previous bar was current, could have been in an entirely different place on completly not there. So It makes the indicator unreliable. The short answer is it rewrites it's own history to make it look more accurate... The most common mistake in programming that causes this is when the program attempts to look at a bar that is in the future. So because the bar is not currently in exsistance, but in the past the next bar is the future bar in reference to that bar. This gives the indicator the ability to make a decision with 100 % accuracy, but at the expense of changing the past to fit the program.

Thank you so much. All those discussions now make sense! Cheers.

Nancy