Forex Blog

The expert advisors that work on one broker can stop working on another; the problem with them often lies in OrderSend Error 130. If you see Error 130 in the Log of your MetaTrader platform when your expert advisor should be opening a position, then that means that the stop-loss or take-profit levels are set to close to the current market price. In the MQL documentation this error is called ERR_INVALID_STOPS («Invalid stops»). Some Forex broker set the minimum distance between the current price and the stop-loss/take-profit levels to prevent scalping or abusing the quote delays. That’s not a real problem for the majority of the expert advisors that don’t use scalping. To prevent this error from occurring, you need to change the expert’s code.

First, you might want to know what’s the minimum stoplevel is set in your broker’s MetaTrader server. Adding this line of code will output the current minimum stoplevel for the currency pair of the chart, where you run the EA:
Print(MarketInfo(Symbol(),MODE_STOPLEVEL));

You shouldn’t be using stop-loss or take-profit level, which are closer than MarketInfo(Symbol(),MODE_STOPLEVEL) to the current market price. If your EA calculates stops and take-profits dynamically, this is what I suggest you to do:

1. Declare a global variable for the minimum StopLevel; e.g.:
   int StopLevel;
2. In the init() function of your expert advisor define the minimum StopLevel:
   StopLevel = MarketInfo(Symbol(), MODE_STOPLEVEL) + MarketInfo(Symbol(), MODE_SPREAD);
   Note, that adding a spread difference is also required.
3. The next time your stop-loss or take-profit is calculated, just check them to be not less than StopLevel:
   if (StopLoss < StopLevel) StopLoss = StopLevel;
if (TakeProfit < StopLevel) TakeProfit = StopLevel;
4. Don’t forget to refresh the current market rates with RefreshRates() before adding the stop-loss/take-profits levels to the actual market rates.

That should help in the majority of the cases. At least, for me such handling of the OrderSend Error 130 has always worked.

Tags: error, expert advisors, MetaTrader, MT4

This entry was posted on Monday, October 6th, 2008 at 3:28 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.