Visualize economic indicators with MT5 indicator

2022-10-16 2023-11-30

I want to quickly check economic indicator data

One of the few tasks that a human being must consider when operating an EA is the decision to start and stop the EA.

These days, it is essential to check the policy interest rates of each country and major economic indicators such as the inflation rate (= CPI/Consumer Price Index) that influence policy rate decisions...

The original benefits of automated trading are

The ability to continue to trade under a set of rules.
No operational burden

We think it is.

Recently, I have been putting a lot of effort into following the news and committing historical data on indicators to memory, and I feel that my operational load is not low by any means.

I thought it would be good to have an easier way to check economic indicators in order to continue automated trading without strain, so I reorganized the situation.

Current Confirmation Method

Understand the overall feel of the market and the economic indicators to watch by listening to the easy-to-understand explanations of financial Youtubers.
Tour news sites and check regularly for details and background.

I often check this process,

Looking back again, I realized that I was unconsciously (without setting frequency or time) watching Youtue and news, which was not a time-efficient state.

How can we be sure?

Identify high-impact indicators
Check indicators regularly.
Identify changes, whether they are good or bad, and understand the background
Making Trade Decisions

This is the process, though,

Since the time efficiency of 2 and 3 is low, it would be good if these labor saving (or automation) could be realized.

If all data can be viewed in MT5 in a concise manner, it will reduce the number of website visits and shorten the time required,

Using the MT5 Indicator
Display time series data of indicators
Display data by country for the same (similar) indicator on one screen

If you can do this, you will be able to make progress.

I searched the web and the marketplace on MQL5.com for a way to do this, but I couldn't find the feature I wanted...

I decided that if I didn't have it, I would make it, so I made a prototype.

Easy visualization of indicator trends with the Economic Indicator Custom Indicator!

Operation image

impression

With a few simple steps, you can now visually see changes in economic indicators and country-by-country comparisons.

Now that we can open MT5 and see at a glance the time-series trends of indicators and comparisons by country, we think we can improve on issues 2 and 3 (about half of them).

(Opening MT5 on a PC is a hassle in itself! )

Rather than following the news vaguely, we can start with a bird's eye view of the data and then focus on points of discomfort to follow the news.

I think it has narrowed the focus of Web searches and made it easier to understand the content.

Specifications (original data)

Economic Indicator Calendar, Forex News

We used economic indicator data provided by MQL5.

The sources of the economic indicators displayed on this site seem to be automatically collected from statistical data release sites published by each country.

I'm afraid that if I collect the data by myself, I would lose days just to set up the logic, since the access points are different in each country,

Implementation was also easy from MQL5, the MT5 application development language, because the indicator data displayed on the MQL5.com site can be accessed seamlessly from the program.

The release notes clearly state that this is an addition to MQL5, so it would be difficult to implement in MT4.

The information maintained on the site seems to date back to around 2007, and we were able to confirm the trend of the index for about 15 years.

There may be cases where you would like to see an even longer term, but this is an area of challenge.

Specifications (target countries)

The following eight currencies are generally considered to be the major currencies with the highest FX trading volume.

USD, EUR, JPY, GBP, AUD, CAD, CHF, NZD

The economic indicators of countries that use these as legal tender are considered significant to check in terms of the amount of legal tender in circulation,

The index covered eight countries: the U.S., the EU, Japan, the U.K., Australia, Canada, Switzerland, and New Zealand.

It is unlikely that you will trade stocks other than this combination of 8 currencies (8 x 7 / 2 = 28 stocks), and I think the range is sufficient.

Specifications (indicators that can be displayed)

Must be an indicator of high importance.
The existence of common (or near-common) indicators in the eight countries

As a result of the selection based on the following criteria, the following can be displayed

policy interest rate decision
unemployment rate
GDP
CPI (y/y)
CPI(Core)(y/y)
PPI (y/y)
Retail sales (MoM)
Retail sales (y/y)

However, there were cases where countries other than Japan/USA/Euro/UK did not have the same (or similar) indicator.

(Retail sales (YoY) do not exist for Canada, etc.)

summary

I think we have improved a bit on the immediate issue, as we can now easily view and confirm economic indicators.

The factors that directly influence the strength or weakness of a currency are the collection of data on the yield on the 10-year Treasury bond of each country and the logic used to determine the strength or weakness of the currency,

It is likely that data will need to be acquired via API from a statistical data provider site such as FRED.

We may be able to implement it, but we would like to reexamine it for other requirements.