Plot News (version 2.0)

I'm not 100% sure about this, but I think that the time zone being employed by the alternate gateway differs from the previous source. The former appears to be New York time while the previous source was definitely GMT.

This being the case, a more appropriate caption for the parameter MT4TimezoneGMTplus would be 'Number of hours your MT4 is ahead of New York time', while LocalTimezoneGMTplus would be 'Number of hours your local time is ahead of New York time'. Or in other words, if the symbols are being plotted underneath candles that are 4 hours behind the correct news time, you'll need to add 4 to your existing timezone parameter value(s) (because New York time is currently GMT-4 hours).

Hanover

You are right, It's MT4TimezoneGMTplus = 6 for me. (an extra 5 in the UK). It took me a while to realise what was wrong.

Why do you not use Forex Factory data? it may not be perfect but
it's the one we use daily and are all familiar with.

Thanks for an excellent indicator I only hope it continues to work!

r

The original PlotNews indy used FF data, but it necessitated the use of an external app (which I wrote using Clarion) to download the data, which many folk found too user-unfriendly; I spent a lot of time answering questions in the thread. Hence I wanted to find a news source that I could download using MQL4 (MT4's native programming language), i.e. from within the indy itself. Version 2 was the result.

With the FF calendar there are two possible approaches (that I'm currently aware of):

1. Download and parse the HMTL code itself, on a character by character basis. Using MQL4 this was taking anything up to 10 minutes to parse a week's worth of news data (a ~200K HTML file). Another problem is that whenever the format of the HTML, or its web location, is changed (which web developers can do at any time, and without warning), the downloading and or parsing algo has to be modified accordingly.

2. Use the XML file supplied by FF (and used by Derk Wehler's news indy). The drawback is that it doesn't contain anything other than this week's news (no history is available, or 'Actual' announcement values). I wanted an indy that not only warned of upcoming events, but allowed me to study the impact that prior events had on price behavior.

There's also a potential traffic problem. In the early days of the original Plot News, I was asked by FF whether continual use of my FFcal.EXE app by Plot News users was the cause of one of their servers slowing and/or crashing. Of course I had no idea, let alone control over, who was running it or when. If, whenever the news indy refreshed itself, it also downloaded/parsed the news data, then this would have made any traffic problem worse (changing the pair or TF of a MT4 chart causes a refresh). That was another good reason for making the download/parse a separate app.

I'm planning to create Plot News v3, when I get some spare time, not sure when. This will likely consist of a basic news indy, and a MT4 script that takes in the necessary parameters, and automatically calls a Clarion module to process the FF calendar HTML and maintain a history file. The script would be able to be run (for example) only once per hour. This will hopefully address the majority of the issues (lack of user friendliness; separate process to reduce traffic overload; ability to display news history) that I've noted.

Long winded answer, I'm afraid, but you did ask the question.

This version (2.0) is now obsolete.

Version 3.0 can be found here.