Alert is a useful feature of an indicator to warn trader about some important event — a color of an indicator changing, or its value approaching some significant level, or a plain buy/sell signal arriving. MetaTrader platform (version 4 and 5) supports three types of conventional alerts:
PlaySound() function can be used to play a small but noticeable sound file (.wav) to alert a trader.Alert() function, it brings up a special popup window with a list of indicators’ alerts.SendMail() function; such alert messages may contain quite a lot of information.Of course, there are other ways to alert traders, but they are nonstandard enough to omit them (FTP uploads, chart object drawing or even importing functions from DLLs can be used). Only 10 out of the 37 free MetaTrader indicators currently listed on EarnForex.com support alerts. Only three of them support all three alert methods:
Coincidentally, all three have been coded by me. Aroon Up & Down supports both popup and email alerts, while Traders Dynamic Index supports popup and sound alerts. Easy Trend Visualizer, Pattern Recognition Master and TRO MultiPair support only popup alerts, while Spread supports only sound alerts.
When it comes to my own preference, I rarely use any alerts at all. There are two reasons for this. First, I almost never use indicators in my trading. Second, when I do use indicators, it happens on
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