I made a forex bot in R, how can I automate it?

Trading Systems Expert Advisors and Automated Trading
1

I made a program that predicts the price in the future, and comes up with the appropriate amount to trade. It trades 7 currency pairs at once. It runs once an hour. I programmed it in R, a statistical computing language.

I have some questions:

  1. What is the best place to get a stream of data (hourly or minutely) without me having to download it myself?
  2. I can probably run the R program from the command line once an hour with a crontab, and output the trades somewhere. How do I interface with a broker? I know all the trades I want, so is there some way to tell the broker to make those trades for me? Also, would I be able to see the trades I have open, so I can make decisions about the new trades based on the old trades (for example, if I have 100 EURUSD long open, and want to short 100 EURUSD, I need to sell 200)?
  3. Can anyone link me to any other posts that would help me?

Thanks.

2

I have seen some dll that will link mt4 price data to an R program I am not sure if the link could go both ways as is. I bet you could write an MT4 expert that was linked to you R program with a dll. That expert could make your trades on the mt4 platform.
Have a look here
https://sites.google.com/site/prof7bit/r-for-metatrader-4

7bit is the guys name on forex factory he has a thread there with more info.
I would be interested in any ideas you have about predicting price.

3

I recently discovered a freeware site where you can build your own EA by using popular TA tools and indicators. You could take a look: Forex Software | Forex Software
I think this software will become very popular. I had some ideas of my own for building an EA, but building one needs a lot of backtesting and tweaking.

4

If you have an account with Interactive Brokers you can use the R package IBrokers designed for that:


http://www.interactivebrokers.com/en/p.php?f=minimumDeposits

If your account is smaller, then going the route already described by Shr1k with MT4 may be the way to go.

5

I’m using a EA that stores the stream of data tick by tick on a SQL database (mysql / postgresql), from that database you can extract whatever you want, group the information to form bars of 1 minute, 30 seconds, 20ticks or whatever timeframe you wish, and then analyze that information with R, and pass the command to another EA that continuely reads from the database.

It was very easy to integrate a database in the EA :slight_smile: only import a DLL, and use the normal functions described on each of the database’s manual.