A crude "API" for MetaTrader 4

In response to Ludosm's request to publish this utility, here it is.  Using this API, any other software can drive trade functions in MT4 by generating simple one line CSV files in a similar format to the original MQL4 trade commands.

So where you would write the following in an EA ....
OrderSend(symbol, cmd, volume, price, slippage, stoploss, takeprofit, comment, magic, expiration, arrow_color);

.... the CSV file looks like this
OrderSend, symbol, cmd, volume, price, slippage, stoploss, takeprofit, comment, magic, expiration, arrow_color

A price of Bid or Ask is interpreted correctly.

An important difference is that open orders are located using their Comment, meaning that comments should have a numerical sequence.

So OrderClose(ticket); becomes OrderClose,Comment

There are additional comments at the top of the script.  Hope it's useful.

1500 and counting; what's coming up

Very gratifying to see that I've passed the 1500 mark with hits to this blog - thanks everyone for the interest. So that's a very modest average of 10 hits a day, although it started very slow and has risen to about 50 per day recently. As an aside, it's fascinating to be a microscopic part of the Google machine. The blog has so far had 11 ad click-throughs to generate $18.11 revenue in five months!! Keep on clicking, guys - I'll give up my day job soon :)

In the meantime, I have lots of balls in the air with trading and coding ideas (happy as a pig in sh*t, as they say)

1. First priority - finish off an article which expands on my auto-generated documentation for MQL5 post in this blog. The Metaquotes guys have showed an interest in it and it's likely to be published on the official MQL5 site. The last thing to finish off is a comment processor which trawls through the entire MQL5 folder and subfolders and slightly modifies the comments so that they can be read in by Doxygen and appear in the comiled help documentation.
2. Finish off the MQL5 Virtual Order Manager so people can try it and comment. I've written the VOM itself, but need to polish up the EA I use to test it so it can be debugged more fully. This EA is a series of buttons in a chart window which allow real and virtual orders to be opened and closed. I'll probably release the whole lot then, but also need to follow up quickly with an indicator which reports open virtual orders in a table.
3. The Neural Network EA has been grinding along. I hit a difficult snag with the retrieval of history - other people have also complained that they can't retrieve the full history with Close[xxxxx]. My testing seems to indicate a limit of 1000 bars in the past (or is it 1024?) or only 10 days of 15 minute bars, although some others talk about a gradually increasing value of Bars but they can't work out what triggers it. The EA and associated neural network dll works well functionally, but the neural network can't be trained on a sufficiently long dataset to prove the concept. I can see two ways forward: either write a history reader which reads history directly from the MT4 *.hst files. Or, write the whole damn thing in MQL5, which I have found doesn't have the limitation. The latter will take a lot more time, but I've always had a plan to write a learning neural network in MQL5 in preparation for the trading championships in 2010, so I'm leaning that way. I wish Metaquotes would let us know when the strategy tester will become available.
4. Allow me some (OK, a lot of) misty speculation: if an MQL5 neural network EA proves to be profitable (or any MQL5 EA), then it would be quite easy to write a MetaTrader 5 to MetaTrader 4 messaging utility to enable any MQL5 EA on demo to trade live now using MetaTrader 4. Already sitting in my MT4 code archive somewhere is a crude MT4 API EA which accepts trading commands via *.csv files.