TA Forex Trading

Thanks for the enlightenment on "extern" pennies.    I get it now thanks to your simple reply.   

In regard to "onTick" versus "expert Start", I knew that onTick began to run upon receipt of the first tick of data from the broker but isn't it the same for the expert Start function?    Aren't they both functions which begin top/down operation of the command statements?

I'll play around with the "forexeadvisor.com" site.    It may help.

And I may have to give up on the ema crossover EA plan in time, but I still want to see if it won't increase my gains by adding other variables in time.

The primary difference between the 2 commands is that the "Expert Start" starts the EA immediately and the "OnTick" command waits for 1 tick of data to come in before starting the EA...so there's really not much difference between the two, other than that one starts immediately and the other waits for 1 tick to show up before kicking in.

Originally, the OnTick function wasn't available. It was added after Build 600 in MT4 (see excerpt below).

By the way, I wouldn't recommend MT5. The more I read up on it, the more I realize there are substantial problems with it. For example, MT5 requires re-writing a ton of code with different commands. It actually had a pretty low adoption rate compared to the MT4 crowd and the code rewrites are a large part of that problem.

Here's an excerpt straight from the MT4 Help file...

init(), deinit() and start() predefined functions have remained for compatibility, however, OnInit(), OnDeinit(), OnStart(), OnCalculate() and OnTick() ones can now be used instead. Besides, new predefined OnTimer(), OnChartEvent() and OnTester() handler functions have been implemented. In the previous MQL4, predefined functions could have any parameters and any return type, and they could be called by their names, not signatures. In the new MQL4, all predefined functions should strictly correspond to their signatures. In other words, they should have precisely defined set of parameters and return type.