Last Few Months of FOREX Market

EUR/USD at October Levels as Retail Sales Rise
December 11th, 2009
The EUR/USD currency pair dropped to the lowest levels since early October today as the fundamental indicators in U.S. showed that the country is performing better than the traders and the investors expected previously. Although the Wall Street is trading quite mixed, the dollar is performing well against everything on Forex. EUR/USD is now trading near 1.4606.

U.S. export and import prices increased by 0.8% and 1.7% respectively in November. This price growth surpassed the last month’s gains by 0.2% and 0.8% respectively.

Retail sales report was a real surprise today — the sales increased by 1.3% in November after rising by 1.1% in October (revised down from 1.4%), while the median forecast for this indicator pointed at only 0.6% growth. It looks like the consumers are becoming more willing to spend as they feel that the crisis is over.

Business inventories rose by 0.2% in October, following 0.5% drop in September (revised from 0.4% drop) and 0.2% drop forecast for October.

Tags: business inventories, export and import prices, retail sales
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EUR/USD Falls Slowly, Fundamentals Are Pro Dollar
December 10th, 2009
EUR/USD posted little daily volatility compared to the recent trading days today despite some interesting macroeconomic statistics coming out throughout the world. While the weekly jobless wasn’t very favoring for the greenback, the budget and trade balance deficits were better than expected and could help the dollar to grow against the euro. Anyway, EUR/USD dropped slightly today and is now trading near 1.4719 after opening at 1.4738.

Initial jobless claims increased to 474k last week in U.S. — up by 17k from the week before (457k). The forecasts were for a down move to 455k for this weekly employment indicator.

U.S. trade balance deficit declined from $35.7 billion to $32.9 billion in October. The exports grew faster than the imports. The average forecast value for the deficit was at $36.7 billion.

Treasury budget report for November showed a deficit of $120.3 billion — down from $176.4 billion deficit reported for October and also below $125.2 billion deficit reported for November 2008. The market analysts expected a deficit at $135 billion.

Tags: budget deficit, initial jobless claims, trade balance
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Forex Expert Advisor on Customizable Moving Average Cross
December 9th, 2009
Today I’ve finished the tests of both versions of my new MetaTrader expert advisor and uploaded it to the site. It’s called Adjustable MA and is available for MT4 and MT5. It allows a rather deep customization of the moving averages and other parameters of the EA. It’s a rather basic expert advisor that trades on a cross between two moving averages. The interesting part is that you can modify many parameters, making it quite a useful tool for the Forex geeks.

The back-test of this wasn’t very interesting. I’ve optimized it in the MetaTrader strategy tester to find the best parameters, but the back-tests aren’t very reliable for this kind of expert advisors. You can see the balance graph of the 1-year test here (the test was conducted on EUR/USD M5 chart):



I also forward-tested this EA for several days and found that it works fine with more logical parameters and with other currency pairs too.

You can also view the complete testing report. Go directly to Adjustable MA expert advisor page to download this EA or get more information about it. If you don’t like Adjustable MA, you can check other MetaTrader expert advisors.

Tags: download, MetaTrader expert advisors, moving average, MT4, MT5
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EUR/USD Stops Falling Higher Oil
December 9th, 2009
The dollar stopped growing against the euro today as the Forex market reacted on the growth of the oil price with the decrease of the inventories. The rising U.S. stock markets also helped EUR/USD to recover. The currency pair is now trading near 1.4747 after falling as low as 1.4667 intraday.

Wholesale inventories increased by 0.3% in October, following 0.8% drop a month earlier (revised from 0.9% drop). The indicator was expected to decrease by 0.5%.

U.S. crude oil inventories lost 3.8 million barrels last week. During the same week, the total motor gasoline inventories gained 2.2 million barrels. Both are still above the upper limit of the average range for this time of year.

This Monday a report on consumer credit was released for the month of October. Total credit amount decreased by $3.5 billion, which is better than $8.8 billion drop in September (revised positively from $14.8 drop). The average forecast was at $9.4 billion decline.

Tags: consumer credit, crude oil inventories, wholesale inventories
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Otkat Pull-Back EA — Now in MetaTrader 5
December 8th, 2009
I’ve done my first conversion of the MT4 EA to MT5. Although it’s not my first EA written for MT5 (the first one was AUD/JPY Wednesday 15:00), it’s the first one converted. I must say that I was quite pleased with the MQL5 and the whole MetaTrader 5 during this conversion process. The pull-back expert advisor Otkat doesn’t use any hedging or position pyramiding and is quite simple for MT5 to handle. While the resulting code’s size become bigger in the new version, the readability, along with some other things, is much better now. So, here is the list of new features for Otkat:

Better and cleaner code
Description displayed in MT5 when EA is attached
Proper types of the input parameters
Works properly with all timezones (this was also implemented for MT4 version)
No garbage code
Proper work with 5/3-digit quotes
You can get the code of MT5 version or read more info about the expert advisor.

Tags: expert advisors, MT4, MT5
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Unresolved Function in MT5
December 8th, 2009
After the latest update of the MetaTrader 5 terminal beta (to build 228) the new error appeared in the newly recompiled expert advisors. When adding an EA to a chart an ”Unresolved Function” error is displayed in the Experts output tab and the EA isn’t attached (even the input parameters dialog doesn’t appear):



The error appears only for those expert advisors that were compiled after the update to build 228. It looks like the error is caused by the declaration calls of MqlTradeRequest object, which is required to send trading orders/trades to the system. EAs can’t function without such objects. Of course, it’s only a beta testing period for MT5, but with such errors it’s now impossible to test any new MT5 expert advisors or use the updated EAs. The only thing traders and developers can do now is to wait for the new build of MetaTrader 5 platform to be released.

Update: This error was solved the next day in the build 229 release of MT5 beta.

Tags: error, expert advisors, MetaTrader, MT5
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Easy Trend Visualization in MT5
December 6th, 2009
Added an MT5 version of the Easy Trend Visualizer MetaTrader indicator to the site today. It has almost the same functionality as an MT4 version. The conversion process was rather painful with this indicator and it was the first time I really hated new MQL5 and MT5. Not only the code became more bulky after the conversion, but also the MT5 indicator display system wouldn’t allow doing the same things that MT4 allowed to do easily, in sense of the visualization. It resulted in two main disadvantages compared to old indicator version:

More indicator buffers to do the same things
The support/resistance lines have ugly vertical appendages
On the bright side, I’ve finally found out that the order of elements in the indicator buffers can be inverted (to make it the same as in MT4) by simply calling ArraySetAsSeries() function in the OnInit() event handler. That can really help in the indicator development. Despite all the bad, there are two minor advantages in the MT5 version of Easy Trend Visualizer:

Description displayed when adding indicator to chart
Readable code
You can get the code of MT5 version or read more info about the indicator.

Tags: MetaTrader indicators, MT5, trend
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Forex Technical Analysis for 12/07—12/11 Week
December 5th, 2009
EUR/USD trend: hold.
GBP/USD trend: sell.
USD/JPY trend: hold.
EUR/JPY trend: hold.
GBP/JPY trend: sell.
Floor Pivot Points


Ultra-Surprise in Nonfarm Payrolls Pushes EUR/USD Down
December 4th, 2009
EUR/USD is currently showing the biggest daily drop since March 27 this year as the nonfarm payrolls report positively surprised the dollar bulls, giving a lot of confidence in the U.S. currency. The higher dollar sent the commodity and equity markets in the red zone despite the promising fundamental conditions. EUR/USD is now trading near 1.4833 after reaching as high as 1.5090 intraday.

Nonfarm payrolls were reported at -11k in November, following -111k in October (revised considerably from -190k). The median analysts’ forecast for this indicator was at -125k. As you see, the market participants didn’t expect such a drop in the unemployment decline rate. The latest report suggests that the new nonfarm workplaces may start to appear in few months. The overall unemployment rate dropped from 10.2% to 10.0%, while the expectation was that it remains at 10.2%.

U.S. factory orders rose by 0.6% in October, following 1.6% growth in September (revised positively from 0.9%). The consensus forecast for the latest release was at 0%.