ChannelEA1: Your Go-To System Trading Tool for MetaTrader 5

ChannelEA1 is a nifty little system trading tool designed to work seamlessly with the ChannelInd indicator. The best part? You don't actually need the indicator for it to function since all the necessary calculations are handled directly within the EA.

This EA trades on a set schedule. Based on the trading times you specify in the settings, it places two pending limit orders at the edges of the channel and sets Take Profit levels on the opposite side—without a Stop Loss. Once the trading period wraps up, all open positions are closed, and any untriggered orders are wiped clean.

Keep in mind that this Expert Advisor is primarily intended for training purposes.

ChannelEA1 comes with eight customizable input parameters:

Begin Hour - when your trading session kicks off
End Hour - when your trading session wraps up
Expert's Magic Number - a unique ID for the EA's trades
Lots - the trade volume you want to open
Price Slippage - the maximum slippage you’re willing to accept when opening trades
Spread Multiplier for Stops - a multiplier used to determine the proper distance for stop orders (*).
Wait Time for Environment Update (in seconds) - how long to wait for the trading environment to refresh (**)
Attempts to Get Environment State - how many tries to get an accurate read on the trading environment (***)

* Keep in mind that for pending orders (as well as Stop Loss or Take Profit), there’s a minimum distance requirement known as StopLevel. This means that you can't position your pending order (including Stop Loss or Take Profit) too close to the market price. If StopLevel is set to zero, it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist; it simply means it’s variable. Usually, the minimum distance equals the spread, but sometimes even double the spread isn’t enough. This parameter lets you set a custom multiplier for the spread to calculate your minimum order distance.

** When an order is sent to the server, delays can occasionally throw off the count of market positions. If this happens, the EA will wait for the specified seconds before rechecking the environment.

*** The number of waiting periods you can set within one tick is adjustable in the EA settings. After all attempts to get an accurate environment, the EA will pause and wait for the next tick. If the environment hasn’t updated by then, the EA is ready to retry on the new tick.

To evaluate the strategy, we ran tests with default settings using data from January 2, 2017, to March 29, 2018. Unfortunately, the EA didn’t perform well with these default settings. So, we optimized the trading start and end parameters (Begin Hour and End Hour) specifically for EURUSD on an H1 chart in the 1-minute OHLC mode. The results were much more promising this time: