MetaTrader - Account Functions

Welcome back, fans of Automated Forex trading.

In this post, let's take a look at account related functions in MetaTrader programming. Take a look Account Functions and scroll down to Functions Accessing to the Information about the Active Account.

Go ahead and fire up MetaTrader. Right-click on Expert Advisors and select New. Go through the wizard and create a new Expert Advisor called AccountStuff. Go ahead and paste the following code into the Init() function:

int init()
{
Print("Account Balance: ", AccountBalance());
Print("Account Credit ", AccountCredit());
Print("Account Currency: ", AccountCurrency());
Print("Account Equity: ", AccountEquity());
/*
Print("AccountFreeMargin: ", AccountFreeMarginCheck());
Print("AccountFreeMarginMode: ", AccountFreeMarginMode());
*/
Print("AccountLeverage: ", AccountLeverage());
Print("AccountMargin: ", AccountMargin());
Print("AccountName: ", AccountName());
Print("AccountNumber: ", AccountName());
Print("AccountProfit: ", AccountProfit());
Print("AccountServer: ", AccountServer());
Print("AccountStopoutLevel: ", AccountStopoutLevel());
Print("AccountStopoutMode: ", AccountStopoutMode());

return(0);
}

Most of these functions are pretty self explanatory, so I'm not going to go through all of them here. You can step through them one at a time by clicking AccountBalance() then click on the next function name to scroll ahead.

One interesting distinction is between AccountBalance() which returns the amount of actual cash in the account. AccountEquity() returns the cash value of the account plus or minus any gains or losses from open positions and is the value to watch in terms of whether you are up or down. AccountMargin() returns the Account value remaining in the account which can be used to add new positions.

So what does the account balance have to do with trading? A lot as it turns out and since money management is one of the most important factors in all trading and can make the difference between success and failure.

I was hoping to include the code for position sizing in this post, but I ran out of time. Please check back over the weekend for that.

Thanks for reading and come back soon.