Meta Extender
Intro
This application aims to enhance the standard MetaTrader by incorporating professional tools that aid manual trading and eliminate associated overheads. Many proficient traders devote significant time to activities such as managing a trading journal, calculating risk and money management parameters, overseeing stop losses, manually trailing stop losses, executing risk-splitting tactics, and more. Many of these tasks can be fully or partially automated, enabling traders to concentrate on the most crucial aspects of trading - initiating and closing trades. This application was developed based on traders' feedback to enhance the standard MetaTrader. Each functionality can be accessed from a home screen and is separated into convenient widgets.
The available widgets are the following:
- Trendline Trading
- Trading Assistant
- Price Alert
- Second Timeframe
- Candle Search Results
- Pattern Search Results
- Fibonacci Search Results
- Chart Analyzer
- Candle Search Config
- Pattern Search Config
- Fibonacci Search Config
- In-Chart Events
- Stop Loss Manager
- Inspector
- Active Trades
- Pending Orders
- Other Setting
- Closing Assistant
- Trade Splitting
- Exit Application
Given many widgets, covering each in this getting started guide is not feasible. Therefore, this article primarily focuses on installing the application, starting with your MetaTrader and opening a semi-automated managed trade with the Trading Assistant widget. Detailed explanations for each widget can be found in the user manual.
The Meta Extender is a robust tool that can enhance the performance of traders and investors. It also paves the way for fully automated trading. As mentioned on the welcome page, all the products utilize the same software framework. Suppose you're interested in using any feature from the Meta Extender for fully automated trading. In that case, looking into the Expert Advisor Builder and Custom Expert Advisor products is recommended. The Meta Extender is an excellent way to familiarize yourself with various aspects of trading and the overall used trading framework. Whether starting with a demo account, utilizing the Meta Extender with the strategy tester for educational purposes, or trading with a live account, it's a valuable application for many use cases.
Installation
You can download the Meta Extender installer with the web-based downloads portal. The available plans can be found here if you still need to subscribe to a Meta Extender subscription plan. Some browsers may issue a warning and ask if you want to keep EXE files - please choose to keep it!
Once the download is complete, you can start the installation. To do so, please double click on the setup file.
Some users may encounter a warning from Windows when running an EXE file. You can disregard this warning by clicking on More info and then selecting Run anyway. It is planned to address this issue soon, but for now, you can follow the workaround in the illustration below. Please proceed with the setup and follow the instructions presented. During the installation, you'll be asked to select the MetaTrader instance where you want to install the Meta Extender.
Your Meta Extender is now installed and ready for use. All the widgets mentioned in the introduction are now accessible on your favorite trading platform.
Start of application
The product interacts with a backend server, so you'll need to tweak some settings in your MetaTrader. Open the MetaTrader instance you selected during installation and go to the Options menu.
Then, navigate to the Expert Advisors tab and tick the boxes for Allow automated trading and Allow DLL imports. Don't worry about the warning for the second option. The application uses native Windows libraries to communicate with a backend license server, making license management more accessible through a web interface.
The Meta Extender can only be used when the account information matches with the one connected to your subscription. Thus, ensure that you're logged in with the correct trading account. You can locate the Meta Extender under FEA Trading - MT4 - Meta Extender in the MetaTrader navigator view. To start the application, double-click on it or drag and drop it onto a chart in your chart view. The starting process may take up to one minute. You can track the procedure in the status field and the Experts tab.
Each time you launch the Meta Extender, a welcome panel appears. This panel lets you check the version number and adjust the input parameters. If you want to change the default settings, navigate to the Inputs tab. Most trading settings can be configured via the user interface while the application runs. However, some settings need to be configured beforehand. Since the default values for the input parameters are already well-adjusted, you can leave all input parameters as they are.
Upon successfully launching the Meta Extender, you will see the home screen containing the widgets overview:
The Meta Extender is now up and running. It's important to note that changing the MetaTrader timeframe will cause all the applications to reinitialize. Therefore, sticking with the same timeframe while the Meta Extender is active is strongly recommended. If you want to incorporate a higher timeframe, you can use the Second Timeframe widget. Otherwise, please use a second chart window to analyze other timeframes.
Open an order
Let's begin by opening the Trading Assistant widget. To launch it, choose the widget from your Meta Extender home screen: \
This widget is engineered to aid manual trading with an integrated risk and money management (RMM) tool. It promptly informs you about the crucial aspects of a planned trade and provides a convenient one-click trading panel with an integrated order configurator. For instance, it allows you to open trades with a sophisticated stop loss trailing.
The Meta Extender is designed to be visually intuitive by using lines in the chart view to configure stop loss, take profit, or the pending price. Moreover, a trade and its take profit and stop loss are easily visualized to track previous trades. You can read more about the comfort visualization in the detailed user manual. This feature is extensively used across all products, mainly to visualize modification of the stop loss and take profit values of a trade.
Go ahead with configuring the input fields to understand how the risk and money management can interact with the order configurator. When clicking Place Order, a trade is executed immediately without any additional confirmation request.
After placing an order, you'll notice that the moment a trade is opened is indicated by a vertical white line. Another vertical line will appear when the trade closes, and between the stop loss and take profit values, they are illustrated with a red and green line. You can manually close a trade using the Meta Extender widget Active Trades or the MetaTrader trade overview in the terminal view. After a trade is complete, a trading journal will automatically be updated in the background. This happens regardless of how the trade is closed. Please note that only trades opened by the Meta Extender are included in the automatically generated trading journal. You can learn more about the trading journal here.
Feel free to get familiar with the remaining widgets!
Check out the tester mode
The Meta Extender offers an intriguing use case beyond trading with a live or demo account. It can also be used within the MetaTrader strategy tester. Given that the user interface remains fully operational while running a strategy test, you can practice manual trading in a time-lapse with the help of the strategy tester. Combining the Meta Extender with the MetaTrader strategy tester lets you fast-forward and simulate an entire day in just a few minutes. To explore this feature, please navigate View - Strategy Tester to open the MetaTrader strategy tester.
You will notice a new window appearing at the bottom of your MetaTrader. While the strategy tester is typically used to test fully automated trading strategies, you will now learn to use it for practicing manual trading. This feature could be used to revisit the previous week to practice your understanding of the latest market conditions in a calm moment, such as on a Sunday evening. Another use case is for educational purposes when you want to teach and explain trading to someone without waiting hours to execute trades. Indeed, analyzing a historical chart can be challenging. In retrospect, anyone can place the perfect trade and become a billionaire within weeks. In practice, it's different. With the strategy tester, you can learn on historical charts with the feeling of an unknown future price.
To use the Meta Extender in tester mode, please select the FEA Trading\MT4\Meta Extender in the strategy tester settings and ensure that the data model is configured to Every tick. This needs the visual mode enabled to access a chart view, in which the Meta Extender can be used. For the start and end date, you can select any day.
Once everything is configured, press the start button and use the Meta Extender in the strategy tester chart view as usual.
You'll notice that the simulation can time-lapse a day within a few minutes. If you want to slow down or accelerate the simulation, please adjust the execution speed with the slider.
Automatically generated journal
Every proficient trader meticulously records trades in a trading journal. Particularly for scalping and day trading, this is time-consuming. Hence, the Meta Extender automates this process for you. When using the Meta Extender in tester mode, the journal is generated separately from when you would use it on a live chart. You can access the tester trading journal by navigating the tester data folder. To do so, please select File and proceed with Open Data Folder. Then, navigate further down the data folder structure to the following folder.
\tester\files\FEA Trading\Meta Extender 2.0\Journal
The raw output of the trading journal is a CSV file, which can be imported into the pre-prepared Excel journal file. The Journal Evaluation file is explained in detail in this user manual article. To import the raw data, open the Excel file and press import. Upon successful import, discover the automatically generated diagrams and tables.
It requires installing Microsoft Excel on your computer and enabling the macro feature. Excel will prompt for this when opening the Journal Evaluation file for the first time. Please allow the content. If you are missing the evaluation Excel file, you can download it here.
Trading results to go
The Meta Extender will monitor performance and drawdown with the inspector widget. This widget also has a handy web interface that empowers you to access the performance and drawdown data in the Inspector tab within your dashboard. Feel free to activate the Meta Extender on a live chart and check out this feature. This is a great way to stay updated even when leaving your computer.
There is much more to learn about the widgets and the full capability of the Meta Extender. Thus, feel free to take a look at the user manual as well: