But, as it so happens, unless you’ve been the first one to buy a very unpopular piece of software – a few other copies of this EA have been sold.

Let’s just run through this scenario:
20,000 trades get placed simultaneously – or 20,000 attempts are made to get the same trade placed. Online brokers do tend to notice these things, and so what happens, even if you do get filled, the spread rockets up, and there is nearly always comeback on it.

Mass produced EA’s tend to have a life-cycle – they work for a while, they produce a ROI, even 30% or thereabouts, and then they gradually start not working. They get updated, not quite so good, and the pips trail away, until you’re left with very little return on your investment.

Maybe if you’re keen to use an expert advisor, you could learn to write one yourself – it’s not the most complicated thing ever, (if you have done a bit of programming before). Then – and this is about the only way – you’ll know that you’re the only one placing the trades in that exact pattern.

Be a trader – don’t be one little sheep in a large flock….

You’ll need to download audioplus.mq4 file below, and save to your MetaTrader\Experts\ directory.

You’ll also need 2 .wav audio files serving as the signal to tell you either profit or loss.
These go in your “\MetaTrader\Sounds\” directory.

The inputs to be coded are :

Distance – distance of profit (not pips) for when the Expert Advisor sound is triggered
AudioPlus – the name of the sound file played when the price reaches set profit
AudioMinus – the name of the sound file played when the price reaches set loss

Compile (see add ea to metatrader, if you’re not sure) and everything should work fine.

Download:
audioplus.zip

For example, it’s most likely your Metatrader is at C:\Program Files\MetaTrader, so all you need do here is drop it into

C:\Program Files\MetaTrader\experts

if it’s a downloaded expert advisor, or

C:\Program Files\MetaTrader\experts\indicators

if it’s an indicator and it should all show up next time you run MetaTrader.

And that’s it. What you can’t easily do with an ex4 file is look at its source code and edit it to your own requirements – there used to be one or two reverse-engineering applications on the market that would decompile an ex4 to an mq4 – they were, and probably still are, (incredibly) expensive for what they did.

Program files are standard text files – you could open and edit them in a normal text editor (Wordpad etc.) These contain the source code in MQL4 programming language, which is readable, hopefully, by humans. To install an EA in MetaTrader, an mq4 file has to be compiled, that is converted to a binary code – but, no problem, MetaTrader will do this for you.

MetaTrader comes complete with its own mq4 file editor, called, surprisingly, MetaEditor. If you already have MetaTrader installed on your desktop, the editor is associated with this file extension and will (should) open the file if you double-click on the icon.

Installation
You’ve downloaded a mq4 file and you want to install it.

First – and it’s best to do this now, rather than later – you’ll need to copy the downloaded mq4 file to the correct folder in your copy of MetaTrader.

So use a file explorer program, and find out where your MetaTrader is installed. Most likely it’ll be found at C:\Program Files\MetaTrader

(It might be at C:\MetaTrader and the MetaTrader name might vary – if you’ve downloaded it as part of a broker’s demo package)

Now, locate the correct subfolder:
If it is an expert advisor – the mq4 file should be copied to C:\Program Files\MetaTrader\experts

If it’s an indicator, then it should go in C:\Program Files\MetaTrader\experts\indicators

A library? C:\Program Files\MetaTrader\experts\libaries – you should be getting the idea.

Compilation
Double-click on the icon of the mq4 file to open in MetaEditor – you’ll see the source code in the upper window – and hit the ‘Compile’ button in the toolbar, simple as that. If all’s gone well, you’ll see a message, ’successfully compiled, 0 errors’.

And the work is done for you – if you look in the subfolder, you should see a new, identically-named ex4 file – and this will appear in your Expert Advisors list, ready for use. It doesn’t do any harm to restart MetaTrader at this point.

If there are errors in the compilation process, this is because the code isn’t written properly – as can happen, downloading stuff from the net – and would need fixing, which beyond our scope to discuss here, or simply, deleting. Move on to something that does work.

You may see, at times, .mqh files associated with MetaTrader – these are snippets for programming and go in experts\includes – you can’t compile them to .ex4 files. As always with first steps in programming – if you’re not sure, you probably shouldn’t be doing, and leave well alone…