MT4 Problem - Opening a Deal, then Closing it again straight away

Hi,

I have a problem with MT4 Opening a Deal, then Closing it again straight away.

It happening with MT4, Built 226, with 4 different EAs and two different brokers.

It only happens occassionally, but has cost me about $4,000 in losses from the spreads

I run about 20 EAs across two live accounts (GoMarkets and Gain) using four instances of MT4 on a server in the office.

Basically, MT4:

* Opens a deal
* Closes is again straight away
* Repeats the steps above dozens of times in sucession.
* When I look at MT4 History in the morning there are dozens of deals, all showing small losses which are about the amount of the spread.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

See attached example.

It is very hard to read your attachment - most of the resolution has been lost. But it doesn't appear that the SL is being hit. Did you check the Experts tab and Journal tab? Some EAs will write diagnostic messages if the trade is being closed internally. But it strange that more one EA is being affected and you are seeing it on 2 brokers. I don't know if the timing has something to do with it - is happening within a similar timeframe?

What about the leverage and equity levels? Does your broker change these? I should hope that they would refuse to open the trade and not catch you like this, but who knows.

Thanks for the reply.

I checked the Experts and Journal tabs, and the EAs are operating normally.

Margins and Equity levels shouldn't be a problem. If the deals were closed by the broker because of insufficient equity, the Comments would include "s/o".

It has happened to four different EAs, including FAP Turbo, NightFox, Primeval and Cloverix. They all work differently and have been around a while, so I don;t think it is a problem with the EA.

Also, a month ago I wrote an EA and was testing it on a demo account and the same thing happened. The EA kept opening and closign deals in a loop.

Sometimes I think an indicator might be screwed and sending the wrong signals. A couple of these EAs use the "ZigZag" custom indicator.

All of the Magic Numbers are unique.

A copy of the log file, showing the trades, is attached.

Any suggestions appreciated.

The deals are only open for a second or so, then close. SL definitely not hit.

This same problem hit me the first time a couple of months ago, then disappeared. That time it opened and closed about 400 deals and cost me $3,000 that night. I got about $1,000 back as a broker rebate!

Looks to me like some level of corruption is occuring.
Running 20 EAS on 4 terminal apps on a single machine could easily lead to instability problems due to minor bugs in any of the Eas or in Mt4 itself.

I doubt you'll find an answer. Intermitent problems like these can be extremely difficult to identify the root cause(s).

Things to think on:

1) Did it ever happen on other Mt4 builds ... were you running the same set of EAs. If not do you still have a copy of an older build?

2) Are these EAs Compiled on Build 226 ? If they were compiled for a different build then unexplainable glitches like this could easily be caused by this even if the EAs appear to run correctly. Contact the EA vendors and ask for new compilations for your Build.

3) How long has your server been running before these errors occur?
Reboot your server more often. Minor bugs /corruptions can often go un-noticed for days or weeks until something 'weird' happens.

4) Spread your Mt4 apps / Eas over several machines. You're asking a lot for one PC to run flawlessly with that many EAs running, even over 24 hours.

5) How much traffic (number of users) does your office have, running through the same hub/switch/router ? Try running your Mt4 server through a dedicated connection.
It appears there are no specific entries in the log showing "BUY EURCHF" during the appropriate time period... it could be a low level network routing problem resending data packets in error.

Unfortunately I dont like your chances of nailing down the problem without some scale of network traffic monitoring and even then, understanding whats happening could prove impossible.

The action I'd take is :

1) Revert to a previous (stable?) Mt4 build.
2) Ensure the Eas are compiled for the build you are running
3) Use multiple machines preferably one machine per EA vendor.
4) Use a dedicated router / gateway for each server
5) cross my fingers

Good Luck

I'm using MT4 Build 226, which I don't think was as good as 225.

I'm would like to keep all of the instances of MT4 running on the one server, which is Windows Server 2003.

Each instance of MT4 is run as a seperate session.

There is one network switch which runs all of the network traffic, but I don't think it would make any difference.

I'm starting to suspect the MT4 gets unstable when too many chart windows or EAs are running.

Peter,

Pehaps you should post the text logs of the 3 other Experts tabs....and the Journals. The answers might be in those.

Kenny, thanks for the suggestion, I'll get all of the logs when I go into the office on the weekend.

Possibly it's a capacity thing with MT4, where there are too many charts for it to handle.

i'm hoping someone else has experienced the same problem, but it doesn't appear so.

Peter,

Between the Terminal logs(journal) and the Expert logs(experts tab) you will find the answers.

I disagree about the capacity issue. 20 EA's over 4 terminals is not an issue. I routinely run 3x or more than that. I have one EA that I use on 3 charts and I run this EA on 6 currency pairs, then I add in my other 3 scalpers on about 4 currency pairs.

Also the opening and closing of order is a very deliberate things to do.....it is not happening by accident.

I know you don't agree with me but I stand my my previous assertion that this is a magic number conflict. It could be a hidden one.....you can see that the problem is caused by Clover....it is possible that you have another instance of this EA running with different times. You cannot change the magic number on this EA so if there is another instance of it running, it may be closing your trades.

insert a Print() statement before every OrderClose() that you find in the code (or the appropriate close function if there is a higher level abstraction wrapped around it). Decompile the closed source EA if necessary. Let it output the line number and any variable that might be even remotely relevant (everything that is found in any of the preceding if constructs).

This is why I always preach people to not blindly use other people's black box EAs of which you don't know (and sometimes don't even have a chance to learn) how they work or how they are supposed to work.

You cannot let it trade your money if you don't fully understand the rules it is following. Who are you going to blame for the losses? Yourself? The FAP author will blame it on you or your borker or Metaquotes, Metaquotes will blame it on FAP, Your b0rker will blame it on you and so on. You might not even get any chance to ever understand the exact chain of events that finally led to your bankruptcy. Maybe nobody of the above mentioned will ever understand it or even care about investigating it.

This is the sad truth.

Use only your own EAs and you always know exactly who is to blame and why.

Thanks for the suggestions.

I still don't think it is the Magic Number, since it happens to a few very different EAs.

That being said, the problem has gotten worse since I loaded Cloverix.

I've searched high and low and still seem to be the only one with this problem, which is strange.

I'll dissect the logs for more clues. In the mean time I've had to shut down all instance of MT4.

Only one of your dozens of concurrently running EAs might have something like

while it must read.

Although it might use magic numbers elsewhere (or pretend to do so).

This is often seen in poorly coded EAs written by one of these self-proclaimed "programmers" (95% of them) who don't even know the very basics of how to structure a program or what refactoring means or even what a function is and have the same big loops and constructs copy-pasted a dozen times with only slight variations in a horrible spaghetti manner across all of their code and then forgot to replace OrderSymbol() with OrderMagicNumber() in only one of maybe twelve instances of the same loop and it never behaves wrongly when it is the only EA on the same pair but will close out any other EA's orders instantly or randomly when this one offending loop is entered which happens to happen only once every full moon and only on the ticks that come in between dusk and dawn.

Don't use their EAs. Code them yourself.

Whenever you see the above loop (or a similar construct) more often than exactly once in the same EA or whenever you see the dreaded monster-if/else from hell you instantly know that this EA is written by somebody who has absolutely no clue about programming and the EA is guaranteed to be faulty. The direct usage of the Order*() functions without any error handling alone would already be indication enough that the author never ever used one of his EAs in a real live scenario or on a live account with more than $2.50 on it.

7bit, thanks for your suggestion.

The problem:
- happens intermittently
- across several currency pairs
- with four mature commercial EAs
- in two different accounts with two different brokers

Thus, I don't think it relates to Magic Numbers.

It first happened in May, then nothing for a few months. Then it happened again every day for a week. On one day, two EAs had this problem.

The problem got a lot worse after loading Cloverix, but this may be a coincidence.

"mature" or any other claim does not have any meaning with commercial EAs. They are full of bugs. Most of them are not even written by professional programmers and work only by pure coincidence.

Try my suggestion from the other thread on the other forum:

Run them all isolated each on its own separate demo account and in each account place a manual trade in the same pair where the EA is running and leave it open. Then watch it for some days. If any of these EAs closes the manual trade then you know which one is causing the whole mess.

Most likely it will be one of those EAs that operates perfectly and never gets its own trades closed. The faulty EA will only silently close the trades of the other innocent EAs and these innocent EAs are where the problem manifests (and where you are looking for it) but not where it orginates.

I have my doubts about the problem lying with Build 226 because more people would have noticed this and I think the problem would have appeared more regularly (no several month gap).

In an earlier post you suggested it could be related to an indicator. I wonder if the problem could be similar to one seen in poorly written alerts when the alert is sent repeatedly in a short period of time. This happens when the price crosses the threshold, reverses, crosses again, reverses and so on. This can happen within a few ticks and go on for a few minutes. A well written alert or EA using the indicator can guard against this. I think this theory is plausible with one EA being the source of the problem, but more than one exhibiting the same behaviour doesn't seem likely.

Other than that, I would suggest rebooting your machine regularly and stopping and restarting MT4 on a daily basis. If that doesn't solve the problem, then stop using the offending EA if it happens again.

The problem is he does not know which one is the offending EA. Many of his EAs are "offended" in the same way but the actual offender itself is not yet known.

I was under the impression that it happened to several EAs, but one at a time as per the attached log file.

yes. It happens to any EA that wants to open a trade during the timespan during which the offender is in "close all trades"-mode.

In the log you can clearly see that the cloverix EA is desperately trying to open a sell trade starting for example at 08:47:41 until 08:59:43.
it opens the trade but the closing is not in this log. The closing of all these trades is not done by the cloverix EA, it does not even happen on the same terminal. OP can stop searching on this particular terminal, the offending EA is not on this terminal, neither "cloverix" nor "primeval" nor "forex photon" nor "Five EMA CrossOver" nor "MultiversV3" on this terminal are causing it, they are only the place where the problem is manifesting, not the cause of it. OP should direct his attention to the other terminals.

The corresponding close orders will be found in a different log file on another terminal. The one who closed cloverix' trades is the offender. OP must go through all logs on all terminals and find the one where exactly these trades above are closed. OP must find the log file that is full of close orders.

There will be one EA on one of his other terminals that is closing all kinds of trades that don't belong to it like there is no tomorrow. This will be the offending EA.

The offending EA itself will not have any of these open-close-open-close sequences in its own trades since it will do this dance only with other EA's trades, not with its own. This is why it has not showed up on OP's radar screen so far! The loss is always attributed to the EA that opened the trade, not the one that is closing it, thus the offending EA will always look like it has nothing to do with it, it won't show up in the trade history. OP is searching in the wrong place!

7 bit, good suggestions. Let me investigate.

Most of these EAs seem to use the ZigZag indicator, which is a likely culprit.

When it happened the first time with an EA called "Caliber" I decompiled the EA to look at the code. It was a crappy EA, but there was nothing that looked suspicious and the Magic Number logic seemed fine.

I added extra logic to prevent the EA trading more than once every 90 minutes.

As a coincidence, this also improved the overall performance of the EA, because it had a tendency to hit a SL after a short while, then enter a new trade in the same direction. You'd think with a 30 pip SL it would be a safe EA, but if it hit that SL 4 times in an hour it's not good.

Restricting trades like this really improved the performance of the EA in back tests, and after I sent the code changes to the vendor, they later released an update with my changes.

Here is an old log file (attached) that shows the problem.

You can see hundreds of trades opened, then closed a second later.

Looks like an EA is sending the instructions, so cannot blame MT4 or the broker.