Turbo Fridays and Order Closing Times

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Placing no trades on Fridays as a general rule is a good idea
especially with scalping programs. When you are only taking 10 pip
profits if you get stuck over a week end or during a Friday news surge
it could be bad news for your account balance. The first thing to know
however about the FAP stop trading timer is that is does not close any
outstanding orders on Friday nor does it close any orders on the
StopTime setting. The StopTime only prohibits more trades from being
placed after that time.

It should be noted that the timer code used by the FAP programmers is
not that stable. Tests have demonstrated that it will still place a
few orders after the Stop Time is supposed to be in effect. There are
several different options you can use to measure time in the MT4
language. In my opinion they have chosen one of the worst
combinations.

For some reason most MT4 programmers are choosing a means of tracking
time that uses the number of milliseconds that have passed from a
starting time in 1970. The 35 year time span though is not the
problem. The problem is the milliseconds. What seems to be assumed by
most of the programmers out there is that the communications system –
i.e. the internet - is a perfect data stream medium. It shouldn’t take
any great amount of common sense to realize that this cannot possibly
be the case. After the impulses travel through so many hubs and
satellites and what ever to get from a server in Russia to your
computer in America how could you ever expect to be able to track
milliseconds in that stream???

What MT4 has provided however is a connection to a computer clock in
the host server computer. All computers have a millisecond clock that
is used for all kinds of key functions and is very necessary for the
operation of a host of software. But there is a big difference between
detecting millisecond data in your own hardware and trying to pick it
up from a computer 10,000 miles away.

Having watched this clock in real time and seen the erratic flow of
info, I would certainly not advise anyone to use this kind of time
detection for any kind of programming in a trading platform. THIS IS
NOT THE BROKERS FAULT it is common sense attrition of the data stream
through the communications system. In addition, this kind of time
detection triggers on milliseconds. The chance of this trigger coming
in sync with a millisecond data stream is a function of chance and
nothing else.