Ah, you’re swimming in quite a small pool here. Yes it’s possible, and I understand why you want to do it; Excel is more flexible than EAs can ever be, and you can also retain control over every aspect of your strategy.
But your choice of brokers is limited to FXCM, GFT, Interactive Brokers (ECN) and Currenex clients ($50k min). You’ll need a programmer to program the execution of your strats, or you’ll have to get your own hands dirty. It’s difficult. But thereafter you’ll have Excel as your own trading platform (as well as signal generator).
Decent programmer will cost you around $700-$1500 depending on how sophisticated you want it.
Well done rookie, took you far less time than me! I didn’t want to use MT4 brokers so the options were very limited.
Swimming in a small pool - basically, hardly anyone trades using Excel. Reason being - if you’re retail you’ll use an EA, if you’re professional, you’ll most likely get a bespoke solution with Fix protocol that won’t touch client-side applications at all. The only exception to this are a few hedge funds (which is what the Currenex solutions were created for) who want to keep their methods in house but don’t have the programming skills to manage the execution part.
I spoke to loads of brokers, and they’ve very few clients using Excel. More common in stocks and shares I believe. Anyway, you are unique!
I am using simulators for last six months and this thing is actually amazing to learn trading…now i am proficient in share trading and side by side currency also…there is a site fxdialogue where you can join a demo account and learn trading…
I also play at fxdialogue, they have MT4 combined Excel plugin. It seems easier for me to use because I can make charts and graphs with the use of excels. It is useful to people who do not good at using MQL
There is an easier way of turning MT4 to excel
I heard FxDialogue has the only Excel plug in for metatrader.
No need to know coding or to do macro or to hire someone or to ask someone to help you with the charts.
I use the Fxdialogue Mexcel Trader. Only problem is I can’t successfully autotrade from it. Single trades work fine but auto is inconsistent and sometimes does not work at all. Despite several e-mails to the help desk and their replies, no solution has been provided yet. They are promising a patch… don’t know when.
I myself have been trying to find ways to use strategies using excel instead of mt4 as I am an advanced excel user.
Eventually I came to the conclusion it’s best you try and learn the MQL4 language which I did.
If you are able to program in excel it means you have logic. If you have logic you will be able to learn and program in MQL4 as well much more faster and efficiently.
My advise is to stop trying researching ways to trade create indicators and robots through excel and learn the MT4 language instead. You can find tutorials in the Metaquotes website.
I agree, with you. When you know MQL, you don’t want to use excel as you can do all you need with MQL.
But reading this thread I thought of the best of both. It is not difficult to write an EA to read a csv-file with trading parameters and to execute this with simple commands in MT4. You let Excel make the CSv file in the correct folder and the EA picks it up.
I’m sorry, I know very little about EAs and programming, I only trade manually - I was asking Banker if he is back simply because we have chatted on here but then he left. So I know nothing of use about the Excel Builder.
I don’t know if somebody already came with a solution, but you can use excel as an EA without any purchase.
You can create a csv-file in the MT4 folder and have MT4 open it and interpret the file and execute commands. Vice versa, you can have MT4 write data to the same or another file, that is picked up by excel. It requires a script, but when kept simple (reading file, executing trade with given parameters, return data to file) we can discuss the creation of this.
However, what I don’t know is how to have excel read the file. I got it refreshing the csv-file once every minute, but is that good enough? So if somebody helps me out their, both sides are happy.
