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How to Add MT4 Indicators

MetaTrader 4 comes with several built-in and custom indicators to boost your trading strategy. These indicators can locate potential market reversals and continuations, providing you with ideal entry and exit price levels. In this article, we discuss MT4 trading indicators and how to add them to the platform.

What is MetaTrader 4?

MetaTrader 4 is a forex trading tool that provides you with advanced tools to automate trading and place orders even when you aren’t actively in front of your screen.

What are MetaTrader 4 indicators?

MetaTrader 4 indicators are technical analysis tools that can identify various market trends and analyse future price movements. They can help determine ideal buy and sell price levels for strengthening your trading strategy.

What are MetaTrader 4 add-ons?

MetaTrader add-ons are a part of the free indicators that the platform provides you with. The MT4 platform comes with multiple add-ons that allow you to customise the platform to suit your trading preferences. Each MT4 add-on serves a different and specific purpose. Hence, you can combine them together to form the ideal trading strategy.

Types of MT4 indicators

Built-in indicators

There are several built-in indicators that you get access to when you start using the MT4 platform. These tools help you analyse past market performance and place orders according to the expected market movement. Here are some of the most widely used built-in indicators that you get with MT4 –

Freehand Drawing indicator A freehand drawing indicator is a tool that allows you to draw on the charts with a single button. With this tool, you can create trendlines of your own to decide where to enter or exit the market.

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Order History indicator An order history indicator is a tool that helps you examine the historical trade entries and analyse the past price movements so that you can replicate the successful trades and avoid the failed ones.

Position Size calculator MT4 also comes with a built-in position size calculator that helps you calculate the ideal trade size that you need to manage your risk appetite. With this calculator, you can determine the stop loss levels, take profit orders and ideal entry levels as well. For each trade, the calculator provides you with lot sizes that will help you limit your losses to some extent.

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Renko indicator The Renko indicator is used to overlay charts with Renko bars for a better and easier analysis of the price movements in the market. Using the Renko indicator, you can identify the ideal buy or sell levels and place orders accordingly.

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High-Low indicator The high-low indicator helps you identify the historical high and low price levels on different charts in different timeframes. By analysing the historical highs and lows, you can identify the current market trend and accordingly place market orders near the support and resistance levels.

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Autochartist indicator An autochartist indicator is a pattern-recognition tool that helps you monitor the forex market automatically. It identifies trading opportunities for you and helps you place orders near the support and resistance levels.

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Pivot Points indicator The pivot points indicator is a tool that allows you to gauge all market movements with the help of pivot points. While using this indicator, you can also add additional alerts to the charts to get notified when a currency pair makes a particular price movement.

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Zig Zag indicator The zig-zag indicator in forex is one of the basic tools that help determine when the markets are reversing. It allows traders to determine the support and resistance zones, identify price changes and filter price noise, enabling them to place successful trading orders.

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Chart Group indicator A chart group indicator is a tool that lets you link several charts with each other, where a change in one chart reflects the change in all the charts. This tool is helpful because the combined charts provide you with more powerful technical analysis and close to accurate potential price levels.

Gann Signal indicator The Gann signal indicator is used to confirm the trading entry and exit price levels. The indicator also helps predict support and resistance levels, based on which you can place orders accordingly.

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Alarm Manager indicator An alarm manager indicator is a tool that can be used to manage all the alerts from a single platform, create new alerts and set up notifications for several items. You can use alerts with technical indicators, view and edit them, and merge them with alerts you have created on any window of the MT4 platform to keep up to date with the market movement.

DeMarker indicator The DeMarker indicator is a technical analysis tool that helps you compare the latest high and low price of the currency pair to the last period’s high and low price to understand the demand for the pair in the market. This helps you place a long order accordingly in a bullish market and short order in a bearish market.

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Economic Calendar The economic calendar tool/indicator is a separate window on the MT4 platform that shows all the critical economic/financial events that are going to occur in the near future. You can use this information to understand when the market volatility can be more or less to enter or exit new positions.

Custom indicators

Custom indicators are programs developed with the MetaQuotes Language 4 (MQL4) by a trader. These indicators can be added to the MT4 platform manually. The trader can modify, change and add the default indicator’s codes and consider important market factors impacting the market trend to create the ideal indicator. Developing a custom technical indicator enables traders to understand whether the current trend will remain the same or reverse. It also provides them with the ideal entry and exit signals. It helps simplify the complicated trading process by keeping the trader’s specific trading requirements in mind. There also exist several free and paid custom indicators on MT4, which you can edit as per your trading requirements. You can download these indicators on your computer and restart the platform to locate the custom indicator added to your navigator panel. To modify the existing indicators, you can execute the modify command that you will find in the ‘navigator – custom indicator’ window. Go to the context menu, where you will be able to open the MetaEditor. Here, you can change the settings/properties of the indicator to customise it as per your preference.

  • You can create a custom indicator by using the built-in MetaEditor tool.
  • The indicators can be set up by selecting working parameters, and you can change the settings in the ‘window of client terminal settings’ according to your trading preferences.
  • The custom indicator can be imposed into the chart after calculating the parameters.
  • Delete the custom indicator when you do not want it on your chart anymore and use it again whenever required.

How to use built-in indicators

Built-in indicators need not be added or downloaded since they are readily available on the platform. Here is a step-wise guide to using built-in indicators on MT4 – Step 1:
Open the MetaTrader 4 platform and click on the ‘Insert’ menu. Step 2:
Select the indicator from the drop-down option that you want to add to your indicator list. All indicators are grouped as per their type, and you can use them individually or together. Step 3:
Select the indicator you want to use and set its parameters according to your trading preference. Here, you can also change the indicator’s colour and style. Step 4:
After you have made the changes to the indicator’s settings, click ‘OK’ to confirm the changes and use the indicator on your MT4 platform.

How to use custom indicators

You can start using a custom indicator after you have downloaded, installed, and added the indicator to the MT4 platform. Step 1:
Download the customer indicator that you wish to add to the MT4 platform. Step 2:
After downloading the file, locate the folder in which the indicator has been downloaded. In most cases, the indicator will be stored in the downloaded folder of your computer. Step 3:
Open the MT4 platform and select ‘file’ from the top menu. Select the drop-down menu and click on ‘Open Data Folder’. Step 4:
Once you have clicked on the folder, the MT4 folder will open, where all these files are stored on the computer. Step 5:
Open the MQL4 folder on your PC. Then, click on ‘Indicators’ to open the folder. Step 6:
After the above steps are done, restart your MT4 platform or refresh the indicators list on the navigator panel to start using the custom indicators.

Start trading with MT4 indicators today

MT4 platform comes equipped with thousands of in-built indicators and add-ons that help you trade the forex market in a more advanced manner. They help you identify ideal entry and exit price levels, understand when markets are reversing or continuing, and more. Start trading with Blueberry Markets to get access to all the MT4 indicators, build your own custom indicators, and enjoy your trading experience with the MT4 platform through our forex trading platform. Sign up for a live trading account or try a risk-free demo account.

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