How to Determine when Current bar closes?

Hi there,

I'm trying to write an EA that I can set around news events to place a trade AFTER the 15 minute bar of the particular news even closes.

But I'm not sure how to tell when the bar closes. If I use a shift to go 1 bar back, how do I know that's not the bar before the news?

So I'm trying to use time and I'd like to be able to tell the EA what time the news release is. So I have an input field for the EA called "NewsReleaseTime" that I would want to set to something like 08:30 for example. Then I would try to calculate when the time is 15 minutes after the value set for NewsReleaseTime.

So two questions:

1. what data type would I use for NewsReleaseTime and what format would I input the time in when prepping the EA for a trade?

2. what kind of calculations can be done to get me 15 minutes after NewsReleaseTime?

Or is there an easier way to handle this?

Thanks.

You can go at it a couple of ways. If you break down your scenario, you essentially want to wait 15 minutes after a certain event time in order to act. You can try something like this:

Or you can use the iTime and iBarShift functions in Metatrader to keep running track of when you step into a new bar.

Time[0] is the open time for the current bar
Time[1] is the open for the previous bar

If you use 15 minute chart & Time[1] = news time, then you know that the news candle has closed

If you set NewsHour & NewsMinute to be integers (e.g. 13 & 30), you can then test

if (TimeHour(Time[1])==NewsHour && TimeMinute(Time[1])==NewsMinute)
{
news trading logic goes here
}

Thanks everyone, that was very helpful.

can you send me the expect advisory so i can try is and see what u are talking about.pls