Hello, friends! I’m looking for feedback from experienced EA developers. I have an EA that I would like to eventually make public, and I have all kinds of questions around that. I’ve been working on it for years now, and it’s my baby. It’s fully automated, and requires nothing of the user. You just attach it to a chart, set your lot size, and sit back. It backtests at 99.9% accuracy with what I feel are respectable profits, and I have recently introduced it into a live account, making micro trades for real world validation. I still have a little code cleanup I’d like to do, and at some point I need some peer review from someone better at MQL4 than me. Today the source code lives in a private github repo, and it’s a simple matter to add contributors and make it public when I’m ready. I am not a professional trader, or developer, so some pull requests will be extra important. I have seen a couple of people pose the question, “If you had a successful EA, why on Earth would you give it away for free?” My answer I suppose is just general love for my fellow humans. I want to see as many of us as possible succeed. I’m fortunate to have a decent career that I love, and I already have more than I need (not because of the EA). Here are some of the things I’m wondering about. I’ve been googling around on it, but limited results so far.
Any reason you can think of not to do this? The strategy used is very simple, and I don’t think a broker could manipulate it without some pretty serious shenanigans. I can’t see any issue with X other people having a bot that does the same thing at the same time. Anything about it being wide open to the public that I might be missing?
Do I need to do anything special to protect the code aside from the standard copyright line up top? I know the second I make it public it becomes public domain, but could some nefarious actor come along and try to copyright it and pretend it was theirs first or try to sell it? Anything I need to do to put it on record somehow?
Given the consistently 99.9 TDS/duka tick data successful backtests, how long do you think I should have it validating the backtesting in the real market before I release it? I’ve got no issue at all keeping the gates closed for years while she proves herself. The last thing I want to do is lose anyone money.
I have tried very hard to stick to all MQL4 conventions and don’t use any external libraries or indicators. My EA is just raw MQL4 code that responds to every tick. I have only tested this with my broker, Oanda. Can I assume that the same standard MQL4 code would run in the MT4 terminal with any broker, or are there certain things I need to do to ensure compatibility across all brokers?
That’s all for now. Thanks in advance.