Coding EA to check opening price - How do I handle this problem?

How do I handle such a situation with my EA?

If you look at the picture, there is a message at the bottom which says Order Opening at 0.00000 failed [Off quotes]

How do I code my EA to check what the Order opening price is?

Hi there,

I did look at your other EA, but I haven't really been able to figure out the problem......I must also admit, I am not very fond of the EA's created by those websites.

That said, this particular problem is specific to the broker....it is not a problem with your EA. 'Off quotes' is an error generated by the Metatrader server when there is an unspecified technical problem on their side and this is specific to the Boston Technologies liquidity bridge. I would ask the support department at your broker what the problem is.

Or even better, find a better broker......most brokers will have these errors from time to time, but your broker appears to be having more than their fair share.

I am not sure what you mean by coding your EA to check what the Order Open Price is? Given the scope of MQL4, your question is too vague to answer.

The broker said that the off quotes error may happen during news time when price moves too fast.

I trade during news time, but I don't always get such an error. So far it has happened twice.

Sooner or later, I would have to find a way to handle it with my EA.

Below is the code to my buy OrderSend.

As you can see, it would print the Buy order open price:

Print("BUY order opened : ", OrderOpenPrice());

What I would like to do is to check what is the price opened at.

The off quotes error returns a "Order Opening at 0.00000"

If I can find a way to check the price, I can set my InTrade and buyFlag flags to false, so that my EA can continue opening orders again.

This is my Buy Order Signal Logic:

if (TradingTime == true && InTrade == false && Close1 > Open1 && Close1 > Upper1)
{
Order = SIGNAL_BUY;
stoploss = Open1;
InTrade = true;
buyFlag = true;
}



This is my Buy OrderSend Logic:



//Buy
if (Order == SIGNAL_BUY && ((EachTickMode && !TickCheck) || (!EachTickMode && (Bars != BarCount)))) {
if(!IsTrade) {
//Check free margin
if (AccountFreeMargin() < (1000 * Lots)) {
Print("We have no money. Free Margin = ", AccountFreeMargin());
return(0);
}
if (UseStopLoss) StopLossLevel = Ask - StopLoss * Point; else StopLossLevel = 0.0;
if (UseTakeProfit) TakeProfitLevel = Ask + TakeProfit * Point; else TakeProfitLevel = 0.0;
Ticket = OrderSend(Symbol(), OP_BUY, Lots, Ask, Slippage, StopLossLevel, TakeProfitLevel, "Buy(#" + MagicNumber + ")", MagicNumber, 0, DodgerBlue);
if(Ticket > 0) {
if (OrderSelect(Ticket, SELECT_BY_TICKET, MODE_TRADES)) {
Print("BUY order opened : ", OrderOpenPrice());
if (SignalMail) SendMail("[Signal Alert]", "[" + Symbol() + "] " + DoubleToStr(Ask, Digits) + " Open Buy");
} else {
Print("Error opening BUY order : ", GetLastError());
InTrade = false;
buyFlag = false;
}
}
if (EachTickMode) TickCheck = True;
if (!EachTickMode) BarCount = Bars;
return(0);
}
}


The proble is that the off quotes problem isn't solve when I set the InTrade and buyFlag to false under the code:

Print("Error opening BUY order : ", GetLastError());

I believe it is due to the fact that the EA has no problems opening an order, but it received a wrong price that was rejected due to broker momentarily feeding a null price when price moves to fast.

I believe it is the code below that gives me the Order "Opening at 0.00000 failed [Off quotes]"

Print("BUY order opened : ", OrderOpenPrice());

I need to know how to check the Order Open Price after opening the order to see whether it is at zero or not.

Try inserting this line extra :-


This is assuming that EachTickMode is set to false in your settings when you start the EA.

This Off quotes' is a bit of an unusual error.....and to be quite honest, I feel your broker may be confusing it with a re-quote which is a different thing(support staff are often not really experts - no disrespect).

Your broker sounds like a ECN/STP broker and they should fill you at whatever price is available even if the price is moving fast. They just slip you to whatever is available. When you have an Off quote, something has gone wrong on their side, so if they claim it is just a fast market, I would argue that perhaps their servers are too weak to cope.....this is going to leave you massively exposed the day you need to have your stops executed in a fast market.

I neglected to answer your question.......

Yes, the code does give the order open price but it only does so if the order opening is successful.

I have EachTickMode set to true.

Will the code you mentioned still be applicable?

What is the difference if I switch EachTickMode to false?

Actually, try this rather :-


I would need to study the code more, but I suspect the tickmode is a way the EA controls whether to trade on a new bar or on each tick, but without entering a new trade if there are existing ones.

So in this case, looking at the image above and the journal messages, does it mean the order was opened successfully, but the price was rejected by the server as "fail [Off quotes]"?

You are half right, in that the order was rejected at the server.

You have 2 tabs that tell you what is going on.....the Experts tab and the Journal.

The journal tells you what is happening between yourself and the broker, but it does not tell you why or how it happened. Your journal is telling you that an instruction was sucessfully sent to your broker but was rejected.

The Experts tab will tell you what is happening between your EA and your terminal. This is where you will find the output of the print statement from your EA. Any errors from your EA directly, will appear in the Experts tab(IF error handling is correctly coded)......once the OrderSend passes the teminal without any error, the order will appear in the journal, followed the the brokers response. Any errors you find in the journal are broker errors(and any errors you find in the experts tab are EA errors).

I checked the expert tabs and found out that there was no messages about orders being opened during the off quote error. What does that mean?

The Experts tab won't say anything about the off quotes, but it should execute this line :-


So you should have a statement there saying that there is a error opening a BUY order and it should be followed by the number 136 which is the code for an off quotes error.

There was no message in the Expert Tab at all regarding the order.

No "Order Opened:" message and no error messages. No number 136. Nothing.

It does display the usual order opening, order opened, and order closed messages for my other trades.

It displays nothing in this situation.


How about if I add this code?

if(Ticket < 0)
{
InTrade = false;
buyFlag = false;
}

Have you closed the terminal at all since you took the screenshot?

No, I have kept the terminal all along.

It is still open, and I can switch between tabs to see what messages were displayed in each of them.

The last message the expert tab displayed is the expert advisor being successfully initialized.

Sorry, at the risk of asking a stupid question, are you looking at the terminal on your remote VPS where the EA is trading from?

Yes I am

Perhaps there is another way to solve the problem.

How about calculating how many open orders are there currently?


I have this code but can you explain what it does?

//Check position
bool IsTrade = False;
for (int i = 0; i < Total; i ++) {
OrderSelect(i, SELECT_BY_POS, MODE_TRADES);
if(OrderType() <= OP_SELL && OrderSymbol() == Symbol()) {
IsTrade = true;
if(OrderType() == OP_BUY) {
//Close

Ok, try this...........


Seems like one of the brackets was in the wrong place.

The 'else' statment has the same effect as your suggestion of using if(Ticket < 0). You can interchange them if you please.

This is a routine to run through the orders and check if they are buy or sell. You could possibly solve the issue this way, but it is sort of like treating the symptoms and not curing the disease.

What does adding the return(0); do?

And why does the code I mentioned only set IsTrade to True for Sell orders and not for buy orders?