The Forex Market Scanner

Files and Serial Number in post #5

Hello Fellow Traders

I haven't been active on FF for quite a while, mainly because I established my own forum back in 2015. Since then, we've developed numerous valuable solutions (indicators / EAs) that have helped traders achieve profitability.

One significant advantage of working within a smaller community is the absence of noise. It can be challenging to maintain a laser focus on traders' core interests when dealing with a large and diverse audience.

That said, my vision is that all retail traders (all of us) share a common objective: making a profit. Therefore, I don't see forums as barriers to competing interests. If retail traders come up with something beneficial, we should openly share it. Our true competitors are the major players, the entities that are responsible for the majority of our losses.

Recently, our FX Gurus’ team coded a trading solution that I believe should be an essential part of every trader's toolkit. It's compatible with MT4, MT5, and can also be used as a web application.

A few members from FF who are also part of my forum have requested that I share this indicator, asserting that it's the most exceptional one they've come across throughout their trading journeys (and a few among them boast over two decades of trading experience).

Bunker

To accurately gauge market direction, we must rely on a more extensive array of data than just (for instance) a 200 EMA. The major players recognized this fact long ago. Technical analysis is only one third of the required information.

In the Forex market, commercial banks, investment banks, hedge funds, and other major players are commonly referred to as the "smart money." This is due to their access to a wealth of resources and information, including advanced trading technology and market data such as inflation rates, interest rates, unemployment rates, Gross Domestic Product, Purchase Managers' Index, Balance of Trade, Business confidence and more. They use this information to make informed trading decisions.

To succeed as a trader, it is necessary to collect all this real-time market data for a thorough fundamental analysis and combine these with some technical and sentiment analysis, similar to what the big players do with their sophisticated tools.

The Forex Market Scanner (FMS) is a tool that enables traders to do just that. The idea behind FMS is to assess the Market bias based on the strength of a country's economy relative to another, but only if it correlates with the big players' positions and some technical analysis as well.

Bunker

All these crucial key indicators (Sentiment, Technical, Fundamental) are continuously gathered from a solid and redundant infrastructure and quickly analyzed by FMS in real-time, enabling it to provide the trend bias for specific currency pairs right to your MetaTrader platform.

I trust you will find this indicator highly effective (see post #5 for files).

Please note that I won't be actively participating on this forum, as our ongoing work on my Forum takes precedence. Out of respect for FF, I won't explicitly mention the name of my forum, but it is readily discoverable. We are actively developing a series of Free Expert Advisors (EAs) that leverage FMS to determine the Market bias.

Coders, if you're interested in coding your own EA using FMS as the primary strategy for determining Market bias, please don't hesitate to post your request here. Should there be significant interest, I will engage one of the skilled coders from the Forex Gurus' Team to share the code within this thread, facilitating integration with FMS.

Bunker

For now, here is what FMS looks like.

I will provide more details later.




Bunker

Here are the files (you must download 2 files)

You should save the "fmslib" file in the "MQLx/Library" directory, ensuring that you choose the correct file version that corresponds to your Metatrader version. As for the "ForexMarketScanner" file, it should be placed in the "MQLx/Indicators" directory.

Use "BFFFree" (without the quotes) as your Serial Number, as many individuals tend to overlook this crucial step.

Once installed, explore the Smart Buttons toolset, which consists of six buttons at the top. Directly beneath these buttons, you will discover the upcoming Calendar High Impact News.

It's worth noting that you can sort the columns by clicking on the column titles, with the "Bias" column being a common choice for sorting.

Additionally, I will ask someone on my Forum to share supplementary files like "FMS-Data History" (which provides a historical overview of biases for each currency pair) and the "FMS Label" that you can attach to any chart for a quick display of the market bias for a specific currency pair.

Enjoy!

Bunker

Hi Bunker!

I have added the files for FMS-Data History and FMS-Label indicators in this post, for MT4 and 5.
Same serial number that Bunker wrote.
These are all indicators, so place the files in the "MQLx/Indicators" directory.
I guess most people are still using MT4, if you do then use the ex4 files, for the more modern people :-) you can use the ex5 files.
Test them out and tell us what you think.

The indicators are single currency variants, they go in each chart. Only the ForexMarketScanner is multi currency.

It took a very long time developing these indicators, they are connected to a backend service gathering data and doing all the calculations.
All feedback is welcome, preferably constructive such so we can do better if needed.

Have a great day!
Shodster

About a week ago I started a demo of the latest version of FMS-Engulfing EA, not the best time to start trading an EA that have engulfing bars as triggers and like a nice trend, we are clearly in ranging now, look at all the currency pairs showing neutral.
It's still made a profit though, but it's only been a week and I'm expecting way more action when we get down to 12-13 pairs in Neutral.





As usual with the EAs we use FMS score as direction filter, if the score is -3.5 or lower we only allow sells and if it's 3.5 or higher we only go long.
The EA I'm testing thrives on trending pairs, currently only have 3 trades open, GBPUSD and NZDCAD are sells and USDCHF is a long.
The EA has a simple dashboard with name and FMS score, also colour coded if a signal is found and a trade is open.
Running with TP and SL on each pair based on D1 ATR values but also basket close when profit reaches 1% of the current account balance.
Mostly the EAs we have coded close on basket profit, good or bad, it's nice getting a larger balance but sometimes a trailing stop would have been better.

Trading is very easy in hindsight, way harder live but FMS keeps me in the right direction, there's not much price can do against really strong fundamentals, tell you that!!

Shodster

We have been gathering data for quite some time now, it's amazing what you can do with that and some SQL/Excel/Graphs.

FMS measures currency pairs strength as a "Score", range from Strong Sell, to Sell, Neutral, Buy to Strong Buy.
I checked how many currency pairs were in each of the SELL/NEUTRAL/BUY areas and grouped them by time and area.

It's quiet obvious June and July were ranging, most pairs were in Neutral zone most of the time.
August our trending EAs went great, so far in September we're seeing ranging again.



I find it invaluable to easily see which kind of environment we are in, like why is my trending EA taking such a long time getting to basket profit? Well it's an overall ranging market, not any strong pushes, better activate the ranging EA instead.

Next step is to use the overall "Market breathing" as automatic input to the EAs so they can take that decision themselves

Have a great day traders!
Shodster

As long as I have been trading I have read that either the market is 1. random or 2. it is controlled by some spooky outside government forces.
After quite a number of years doing this I have come to the conclusion that short swings, short timeframes yes that's kinda random, there are so many actors in this business that it looks random, it's like predicting the weather, almost impossible, like chaos theory.

But long term, we're talking H4 and up and multiple days or weeks ahead then it looks less and less random.
Bunker started a project looking at fundamentals together with technicals and seasonality data, trying to gather all this and calculate the score.
What I believe now is that fundamentals rule long term, technicals can either "get in the way" by price getting to levels that were hard to break through before, so it creates some kind of phychological barrier. Technicals can also help push along price in the direction it was going.

But fundamentals rule, look e.g. at JPY and its interest rate compared to the other majors and what it has done to it's price development. It's "klockrent" as we say in Swedish...no-brainer is maybe a good translation

FMS takes all of this into account as it calculates the scoring, it's an amazing tool, integrated right into MT4/5 and as a webapp. Very cool.

Shodster

I have developed an EA that takes the general trading direction from FMS, it can be BUY/NEUTRAL/SELL and looks for Engulfing bars in that direction.
Of course if FMS is showing Neutral we do not trade engulfing bars, they work better in a trending environment so we want to look for currency pairs that show either Buy or Sell.

It's a multicurrency EA, it runs on one chart only and monitors the majors and minors + gold, so in total 29 pairs, but that's configurable.
I run it on H4 as fundamentals are a bit slow, takes time to move the score of a currency pair and in my experience going lower only introduces noise and randomness.

Been running for a week now, only 1% profit so far but it's stabile and trades according to my rules.
Which are:

1. Check with FMS if currency pair has a score above 3 (BUY) or under -3 (SELL)
2. Check if price is currently above or below EMA21 for H4 (configurable if we want to use as filter and the period to use)
3. For a Buy we want previous bar to be bearish, last closed to be bullish and have its open <= previous close
4. Body of last closed bullish should be at least 2/3 of the total length, no long wicks.
5. Last close must be above previous open.

Since the forex market is open round the clock we don't normally get much gaps like in the stock market, that's why I'm a bit loose with the rules for no 3, normally engulfing body should have its open and close beyond previous bar, not allowing any at the same price, but I found that I missed a lot of good opportunities that way.

I have a basket close at 1% profit, also configurable, looks good so far, lets hope it keeps up
Currently working on an Inside Bar EA too, same settings really but IB rules as entry trigger instead of EB.

Wish me luck!
Shodster

Got the Inside Bar EA running now too, trades in accordance with normal IB patterns and of course FMS scoring, wish me luck!

Looks like the overall Forex market environment is going even deepeer into ranging, FMS measures and scores the individual currency pairs and gold, from there we can draw some conclusions, like when many instruments are in Neutral we can see ranging or turning behaviour, either price just going up and down or a strong trend has come to an end and it's starting to turn around.

It's still early days but after the trending August so far September has been mostly ranging, not much action.

Statistically XAUUSD ends September lower than when going into the month, it's currently set as a Buy in FMS, interesting to see what will happen

Quick update this morning!

I run both the Inside Bar and Engulfing Bar EAs on the same account now, they have different magic numbers so don't compete with each other.
Currently at 1.8% profit after a week of trading, only Engulfing trades have had a chance to close as the Inside Bar EA was just recently started.
I run them on H4 on 29 majors and minors + gold, so it's not scalping exactly, more long term slow but steady trading, filtering out all the noice and randomness.

Right now I'm running them both with TP and SL set in case something happens but also a basket close at 1% profit. The basket is calculated per EA so they don't work together there. But maybe that would be a cool addition, the EAs can have an extra line for external magic numbers to use only for calculating basket profit.

Will have to think about that, could be something maybe.

Lots of major news today, keep your seatbelts on my friends!!

Shodster

Ended Friday on another basket close, up to 3% profit on closed trades in 1.5 weeks, 2 trades open at BE, very nice results!!

Monday brought in the PIPS! Another basket close for 1% profit, so up to about 4% in total, not bad for about 2 weeks of fully automated trading.
FMS calculating the direction and then the EAs swoop in and grab some easy money, loving it!

Went live on Monday, had a good start, up 3.5% with all trades closed now going into Friday.
Tried to let all trades run to their close only using the EAs, but some I closed a bit early, I thought they had hit a S/R area or PA just looked like it was slowing down.

My general rule is to take the money when it's given, profit is better than loss no matter how small the profit is.
Staying out of the market is a very good way to not loose money, take the good trades, skip the bad.

The Market Scanner has been very good at letting me take only the good trades, the strong imbalances where price moves with purpose!

I have a question, what retail sentiment the scanner uses? Myfxbook sentiment?

How can I get the mq4 file of the ForexMarketScanner?

Hi,

Sorry, totally missed you writing here but welcome again to BFF.
Regarding sentiment, it's from multiple sources but weighted, looks good to us.
And mql file, nope, sorry no, it wouldn't do you much good anyway, the whole backend, written in C#, is running on servers saving data in SQL Server databases, it's also where we do all the calculations written in SQL, the Scanner is mostly a frontend, it would be impossible to build all this in mql4.

Thanks for asking :-)

Thanks for sharing your scanner. Will check it out this trading week.