FXTAA

MT4 indicators and technical analysis — no magic, no promises

FXTAA is a small reference site about MetaTrader 4 indicators and the practical side of technical analysis. Every article here answers a narrow question: what the tool actually measures, how to set it up, and where it quietly breaks.

There are no signal subscriptions, no "holy grail" systems and no profit claims. Indicators are measurement devices. A measurement device that you do not understand is worse than none at all, because it produces confident numbers you have no reason to trust.

What you need to run any of this

Everything described here needs a MetaTrader 4 terminal and a broker that serves it properly. The criteria are few and unglamorous.

• History depth. A D1 moving average with a period of 50 needs fifty daily bars. Some servers hold years of minute data; others truncate aggressively, and multi-timeframe constructions quietly break, returning zeros.
• A steady tick feed. Alerts fire on ticks. A server that drops connections at rollover leaves gaps in alerting that never show up in the strategy tester.
• No restrictions on custom indicators. More common than you would expect — some brokers strip third-party MQL4 indicators from their terminal builds.

Test all three on a demo account before building anything on top of them. All three are cheap to verify in an afternoon and expensive to discover after a strategy depends on them.

If you have no terminal to test on yet, any broker serving MT4 will do for the check — one widely used option is broken down here: RoboForex.

All articles

• Forex indicator alerter: sound and push alerts for levels

  You marked the levels that matter, then spent the day staring at the chart waiting for price to arrive. MT4 ca…

• Candles: a simple volatility indicator for the forex market

  The distance from high to low is the most honest volatility reading available on a chart. It needs no paramete…

• MT4 indicators: 3 moving averages for all timeframes

  Switching between charts to check whether the H4 average is above or below price is tedious and error-prone. P…

• MACD divergence indicator for MT4

  Divergence is one of the few technical concepts with a mechanical definition — which makes it automatable, and…

• Analysis of COT reports on forex: does this make sense?

  The Commitments of Traders report is real data about real positions, published by a regulator. It is also thre…

• Setting a moving average to another indicator in MT4

  Smoothing an oscillator with a moving average is a two-click operation in MT4 — if you know which of the Apply…

• Technical analysis on forex: how to apply it

  Technical analysis does not predict prices. It gives you a repeatable way to define where you are wrong — whic…

• Spread indicator for MT4 and MT5

  The spread is the only cost you pay on every single trade, and the terminal hides it in the Market Watch colum…

• What is the forex market?

  Foreign exchange is the largest market in the world and the one with the least visible machinery. There is no …

• Day bar info: indicator of the daily range for MT4 and MT5

  By lunchtime a pair has often already travelled its usual distance for the day. Knowing that before you enter …

• Central bank currency losses: how to read the headlines

  Every year some central bank reports a loss of several billion on its reserves, and every year the number is q…