Explore the latest free tools from the MQL5 community. Here's a new indicator, expert advisor, or script for MetaTrader.
Spread is not the same all day. It is small in the London and New York session and it jumps when the market rolls over (around 17:00 New York) and in the first minutes after the weekend. This indicator shows it for the symbol of the chart as a table: 24 hours down, Monday to Friday and "All" across. Every cell is the typical spread of that hour on that weekday, coloured from green (cheap) through yellow and orange to red (expensive), with the number in points inside.
Files
- SpreadHeatmap.mq5 - the indicator.
- BrokerTime.mqh - the time zone class (the same file as in the code "Broker Time"). Put both files in the same folder and compile the indicator.
How it reads
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- The spread is the value stored in the bars of the history (MqlRates.spread, in points). The bars of the timeframe you choose are used (M5 by default) for the last N days (60 by default).
- Statistic of each cell: median (default), average, 90th percentile (nine of ten bars are cheaper) or maximum.
- The colour scale is relative to the median spread of the whole symbol: green up to 1.3 times, yellow at 2 times, red from 4 times (all three are inputs).
- A cell with fewer than 3 bars shows "-". The marker ">" in front of an hour shows the current hour. The first lines show the symbol, the bars used, the cheapest and the most expensive hour.
- Hours can be shown in the broker server time, UTC, New York, London, Frankfurt, Sydney or Tokyo. For a city the class BrokerTime finds the clock of your broker from the Friday closes of the history and uses the summer time of the date of every bar, so "17:00 New York" is the same market moment all year. Saturday and Sunday columns appear only when the chosen zone puts bars there (for example Sunday evening in New York time).
- Optional: write the table (values and bar counts) to MQL5\Files\SpreadHeatmap_<symbol>.csv.
- Bars with spread 0 (not recorded) are ignored by default. If the bars of a symbol store one constant spread, the table is flat: that is what the history says.
- It draws on a chart only (nothing in the non-visual Strategy Tester) and never trades. The table is recalculated when a new bar of the chosen timeframe starts and every minute.
Inputs: timeframe, days, statistic, zone, skip zero, the three colour limits, position and font size of the table, CSV on/off.
How it was tested
- Compared with an independent calculation in Python (the IANA time zone database through zoneinfo): all 24 x 8 cells and bar counts for five setups (median in server time, average in New York, 90th percentile in London, maximum in UTC, median in Sydney) on EURUSD and XAUUSD of a live demo account: 0 differences (3,840 comparisons). A freshly started terminal needs a few seconds before the history is current: the check waits for it, and the indicator asks again after 5 seconds while a symbol has no bars yet.
- Validator-style runs in the Strategy Tester (EURUSD H1, GBPUSD M30, EURUSD M1): no errors, nothing drawn, 663,241 M1 bars calculated without a copy failure.
- The screenshot is a real chart of a demo account (EURUSD, hours in New York time): the rollover hour 17:00 is the red row.
Complement community code with advanced automation from RobotFX.
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