How to AUTO TRADE on MetaTrader with AWS

if you're interested in setting up a
virtual private server to auto trade on
metatrader 24 7
while you're asleep while you're at work
while you're sitting by the pool
drinking my ties
then this one's for you
in today's video i'm going to be
demonstrating how to set up a vps
or virtual private server through amazon
web services
specifically we're going to set up a
windows server through amazon lightsail
which is an extremely cheap solution for
hosting private service
once we have the server up and running
we'll install metatrader and then
install the pine connector expert
advisor and execute a test trade to make
sure everything's working
after that as shakespeare once said the
world is your oyster
if you already have a profitable
strategy set up and working through pi
connector you can set up your trading
view alerts and let the virtual server
handle everything
or if you already have a different
expert advisor script that auto trades
you can simply install that onto the
virtual server and it'll work just the
same
so today's lesson isn't just specific to
pi connector but that is what we'll be
focusing on today
as always there will be a link in the
video description to pine connector it
is a referral link so if you use
my link i get a cut of your purchase
just a few bucks
at no extra cost to you so if you find
this video helpful please consider using
that link or just hit the thumbs up
button that helps just as much
with growing the channel thanks in
advance and for those of you who have
already used the link
thank you so much you are legends anyway
enough about that
let's continue first of all what is
light sale
in my previous auto trading series on
autoview i showed you guys how to set up
a private server using a different
amazon service
in that lesson we set up an ec2 instance
which was much more complicated than
today's lesson
the reason we did it differently for
autoview is that autoview is a chrome
browser plugin that doesn't require much
computing power
so we could get away with using the free
plan on amazon web services
metatrader is a little bit more resource
intensive than a web browser so i
thought lightsail would be a better
solution
plus i thought it might be interesting
to explore an alternative to the ec2
service in today's video
if you want to try the ec2 approach
which allows you 12 months of free
access to the service
you can check out my order view version
of today's lesson in the video
description
all the steps are the same except
instead of installing chrome you'd
obviously install metatrader
anyway the main difference with
lightsail compared to ec2
is that on ec2 you kind of pay as you go
meaning
that you only get charged for what
resources you use this is great if you
know what you're doing but if you're not
experienced with
server management it could also be a
trap as you might accidentally use more
resources than you expected to
and you might end up with a bill that
was higher than you were willing to pay
with light sale however we pay a flat 8
us dollars
per month fee with that price we get a
cheap virtual server that can handle
everything we need in regards to running
metatrader scripts
24 7. we also get our first three months
free
which means you can play around with
this and see if you want to go down this
route without paying a cent
before you need to commit to it the
setup for light sale is also
much simpler compared to the ec2
approach anyway don't worry if you
didn't understand any of what i just
said today i'm going to walk you through
everything step by step
let's get into the lesson now first of
all if you already have an amazon web
services account
from either my auto view series or
you've just played around with this
stuff
before you can find the light sail
control panel or whatever it's called
uh by clicking on all services here and
then click on the light
sail link or you can just type light
sail aws
into google okay so here we are on the
official amazon web services light sale
guide i'm not going to go over how to
create your amazon account because i did
that in the auto view series if you want
to go back and watch that video i go
into more detail about
that side of things but it's pretty
self-explanatory
so the first thing we need to do is
create
an amazon live sale account so i already
have an account so i'm not going to do
that
i'm going to move on to step two which
is create a windows server 2016 instance
in amazon light sale so to do that i'm
going to open this link in a new tab
i'm going to click let's get started now
you can set your instance location to
any country you want
i'm going to set it to where my oanda
server is located
so first of all you can right click on
your
account at least with awanda and select
register a virtual server
and you could set this up here directly
through metatrader
but the price here is nearly double what
we can get on
amazon light sale so i'm not going to
show you how to set
this up through metatrader today we're
going to do it ourselves through amazon
light sale
and besides i'm pretty sure the
metatrader hosting
service doesn't allow dll imports for
expert advisors which
pi connector requires so we can't use
that for power connector anyway
but i might be mistaken about that let
me know in the comments section if i am
one thing worth noting here is that the
server here
is in new york and has a two millisecond
ping to the oanda server
so i'm going to change my light sail
server location
to try and get a better latency so here
i am on the
light sale create an instance page i'm
going to click change aws region
and i'm going to select one of these
american servers i'm
not good with american geography so i
have no idea which one of these
locations is closer to new york i'll
just quickly google that and then select
the right one
now it's a shame they don't have a new
york server here but i'm going to select
the virginia one since that is the
closest one about 400 miles from new
york that will have to do for now
next up we need to pick our instance
image and platform
so if you're experienced with unix or
linux
or you're feeling adventurous you can
select this option and it is
significantly cheaper it works out to be
around 3.50 per month
for the lowest tier option i'm going to
go with windows because i'm more
familiar with windows and i'm assuming
most traders
are so we're going to click windows here
we're going to set
os only and i'm going to leave it on
windows server
2019 then as we scroll down here we have
add launch
script i'm not going to do that we don't
need to do that today
all we need to do is select our settings
here for our instance
i believe we'll be okay just leaving
this on the default
settings we don't need a lot of hard
drive space we don't really need a lot
of
cpu or ram and i'm assuming this
transfer is our network
bandwidth one terabyte will be far more
than we'll ever need
for what we're doing here with
metatrader so i'm going to leave this on
the minimum
system specs and move on to uh the final
steps here which is we need to
name our instance i'm going to call mine
metatrader server and you can't have
spaces so i'm just going to leave that
as one word next up you can apply
tags to your instance i'm not going to
bother with that i think it's optional
and we don't we're only setting up one
instance so we don't need to mess with
that let's just
click the giant create instance button
and see what happens
and here we go the instance is booting
up and in a moment we should be able
to connect remotely and start setting up
metatrader okay our metatrader server
instance is
up and running we can now connect to it
and start setting up the
uh server to do that we just click on
the server
now for some reason i cannot use the
browser-based
remote desktop client
so i'm just going to connect manually
using my windows rdp client
with just the information that we have
here
so i'm going to open up my rdp client
now here we go
now i just need to put in this ip
address
and then click connect now if your rdp
client pops up like this with your
actual current windows login information
just click down here on use a different
account and then we need to input this
username and this password to in order
to connect to this
server so i'm going to do that now
administrator
i'm going to click on show default
password
copy this password and then paste it
into here
and click remember me then i'm going to
click ok
hopefully we can log in you can ignore
this warning since this is a server
we've
set up so just click don't ask me again
for connections to this computer
and click yes and we're in so
just give it a moment to boot up and
configure the first
startup the first startup takes a little
bit longer than
any subsequent connections we make all
right so here we are
we're into our server everything's
working fine let's get this baby set up
i'm gonna open up internet explorer here
hours later
close that close that close that
close that close that in fact you know
what screw this i'm not using
internet explorer anymore it is too
frustrating and
it's going to be too difficult to
install chrome or anything let's just
download the metatrader installation
file
on our home computer and copy it over to
this remote server
i think that will be a lot quicker than
dealing with this
curse upon humanity which is internet
explorer
i'm going to navigate to the oanda login
page login
and then i'm going to download
metatrader okay so here is my
awanda metatrader4 setup file i'm going
to
right click on this and click copy and
then open up my rdp client
and i'm just going to paste this onto my
desktop
and now this file will copy over to our
virtual server
it may take a little while it does need
to upload this to the internet in order
to copy it over
so depending on your internet connection
it could take a minute and now here we
go
all i need to do is install metatrader
there we go
it is installed click finish and now i
can double click
on this shortcut to metatrader
and it should open up here we go it's
gonna be a little bit slow because this
computer is pretty crappy
so here's my server my live account is
set up to
live number four and as you can see we
have an eight millisecond
latency to that server on my home
computer it's around 300 milliseconds
so this is definitely a faster
connection to the
oanda servers which helps when
automating systems
the less latency we have when we're
placing our orders because remember
we're already dealing with
latency from trading view alerts being
sent
to pine connector and then pine
connector needs to relay that info to
metatrader and then metatrader needs to
send that to oanda
so the less latency we have the better
but anyway i'm going to click next
and i'm going to log into an existing
trade account click
finish and there we go we're in here's
my account balance i've only got a
few hundred dollars in here for testing
purposes but everything is working
perfectly all we need to do now
is install the pi connector expert
advisor and get that set up properly
so for that i'm going to go back to my
home computer and download the file off
the pi connector website so that we
don't have to deal with internet
explorer
so here i am on the pi connector website
remember to download the right
expert advisor for your platform i'm on
metatrader4 so i need this file
i'm just going to save it to my
downloads folder and then copy and paste
that over
to the remote server so here's my file
right click copy
back onto our virtual server we come up
to file click open
data folder open the mql4 folder
open the experts folder and paste
our pi connector script
into here there we go now we can either
close metatrader and reopen it or you
can right click on expert advisors and
click
refresh now if we open up the folder pi
connector should be in here
now all we need to do is attach this
script to a chart any chart
and set up the pi connector settings and
our credentials
for using pi connector and we're done
i'm going to close
these charts here and just leave euro
dollar open
i'm going to maximize that and remember
we need to go
view and then symbols or press control u
and depending on which markets you want
to trade you may need to activate them
here so the
pi connector can actually send trade
commands to those markets you can see
all these markets are grayed out
we need to find the markets we want to
trade so in this case i'm just going to
activate euro dollar
so here we are on euro usd i'm going to
double click
on that close this window and then i'll
bring this out a little bit i'm going to
right click on euro dollar dash
f and click chart window
and then i'm going to close this
other euro dollar market so before we
attach
pine connective to the chart we need to
come up to tools and click options
make sure that you have selected under
expert advisors
allow automated trading allow dll
imports those are the only two settings
we need turned on in order for
pi connector to work so i'm going to
click ok there then i'm going to click
on the pan connector script or expert
advisor
right click it click attach to a chart
and now we need to set up our settings
how we
need them to be and input our license id
so for me i like to set my target type
to
take profit and stop plus based on price
i'll leave this as
specified volume and i'll leave this as
pips from current market
i'm also going to change my ea and
license details to display
only the license expiry date you don't
need to do this i'm only doing it
because i'm putting this video on
youtube and it just makes editing a
little easier because i don't need to
blur out my license id
so now i'm going to paste my license id
in here and click ok and everything
should work
just fine there we go a little smiley
face in the top right
it shows my expiry date which is next
year and we have successfully connected
to pi connectors
server so now we're almost done let's
send a test alert on my home computer
to see if our connection is working
okay so here i am on eurodollar i'm just
going to right click here and click add
alert
i'm going to set my condition to greater
than
zero to guarantee that this alert fires
as soon as possible
we don't need any of this turned on all
we need is our web hook inputted
and now we can write out a test command
so first i need to paste in my license
id
then a comma and then the direction of
our order since today
is a little bearish i'll just go with
sell and then another comma
and then we need to specify the market
we're trading so for me that's
euro usd dash f and then
another comma and then we need to
specify our risk take profit and stop
loss
so i'm going to set my stop loss to
let's just make it
1.19 i'm going to set my take profit to
let's just say 1.18 and my risk
to 0.01 which is the smallest position
size i can have through oanda through
metatrader at least
and this should be all we need in order
to test an alert so let's click
create and see what happens okay so the
alert just fired let's go over to
metatrader and see if a trade has been
opened on euro dollar
here we go everything worked just fine
we have
a 0.01 position going short on euro
dollar with our stop loss at 119. take
profit at 118.
perfect but before you close out of your
server make sure to come and delete any
symbols
out of your watch list that you are not
trading through pine connector
because we're on such a cheap plan we
want to keep the cpu
utilization as low as humanly possible
you can see that by clicking on this
little search icon down here
and type in resource short for resource
monitor and then click on this app here
and now this app will tell you how much
of your cpu
you were using by deleting any market
that we're not trading
out of our watch list that means that
metatrader just has a little bit less
work to do
because it doesn't need to update all of
these quotes you only need to leave the
markets you're actually going to trade
active on this list so i'm going to
click on us yen and hit delete
delete delete delete delete and
since i'm only testing euro dollar
through meta trade at the moment i have
a script running
on euro dollar on trading view i only
need euro dollar active so i'm going to
leave euro dollar active
if you were trading other markets you
would need to include them here but any
markets you are not trading
get rid of them and then finally last
but not least it's a good idea to
minimize metatrader
and minimize the console or command
prompt before you exit out of your
server
i don't know if that makes a difference
but i like to think it does that way the
application doesn't need to run anything
visual
it's just running in the background
minimized down to our taskbar that's
pretty much it we now have a virtual
server running metatrader connected to
pine connector
and now this server should run 24 7
without you needing to do anything
uh you might need to check on it
occasionally just in case metatrader
crashed
or there was a windows update that
restarted the computer or something like
that
there are a couple of things we can do
to mitigate that downtime issue
by making metatrader run on the system
startup we can also create a batch file
that will run
constantly and check every few seconds
if metatrader is open and if it's not
open it will open it for us
i did that with my order view lesson and
while i'm at it while we're here i might
as well show you how to do that for
metatrader as well
but if you're not interested in that you
could end the lesson here
and just make sure to check on your
server periodically to make sure
everything is running fine
so i'm going to close metatrader for a
moment i'm going to
come down here and just type run
and then i want to click on this app
here
and now in here we just need to type
shell colon
startup and hit enter and that opens up
the startup folder here
i'm going to create a batch file in here
that's going to constantly check if
metatrader is open and it's basically
just a monitor that will
start up when the server starts up and
just constantly make sure that our
platform is running
so that if anything goes wrong and
metatrader crashes
or the server restarts for any reason
whatsoever we can be certain that
metatrader will reopen itself
so i've already created this batch file
for my order view version
of this auto trading series so i'm going
to copy and paste that
file into here so i'm just going to
right click here
and click new and then click text
document
it doesn't matter what you name this
just open it up
then i'm going to copy this text into
here now you don't need to understand
what's going on here all we need to do
is replace chrome with the metatrader
process
name so to change this from chrome to
metatrader all we need to do is right
click on the metatrader shortcut
click properties and we want to see what
the
actual xe file is called here in this
case it's called terminal
and don't worry there'll be a link in
the video description to this text file
you can just copy and paste
into your notepad and you don't need to
write any of this but i need to
change this to say terminal and then i
need to get rid of this
liner text here so now i need to
write out two quotation marks and then a
space
and then i need to copy this target
string
and click ok now and paste that in there
and i'll change this to say starting
mt4 now this string will change
depending on your broker
and which version of metatrader you're
using so you will need to replace this
string
with whatever your actual metatrader
target file is in the shortcut the
easiest way to get this is to just right
click on the desktop shortcut and copy
the target string
so now let's save this batch file so i
need to go file
save as and then we want to click on the
save as type
change this to all files rename this to
monitor
dot bat click save and we're done
i can close this text file we can delete
this blank text document
and now if i double click on monitor
the script should check and realize
metatrader is not open
as it says there danger will robinson
starting mt4
and there we go so now if i was to close
metatrader or metatrader crashed or the
system rebooted
we are guaranteed to every minute check
if it's not running and if it's not
running it will be started up
so in a few seconds the script will
check and realize that metatrader is not
open
and it will boot it back up
there we go perfect now that we're all
set up
you can click on this close button
whenever you're ready and metatrader
will stay open on this remote server
and you don't need to do anything other
than check on it occasionally to make
sure that it is still running
one thing i should really mention before
we finish today's video
is that depending on which version of
metatrader you are using
and what you're using it to do for
example if you're trading a lot of
markets with pine connector or a lot of
expert advisor scripts and accessing a
lot of market data regularly
this plan that we're on may not be
enough this
one virtual cpu with 500 megs of ram
may not be enough to sustainably run
your operation
you can check how your instance is
using as resources by clicking on this
metrics tab under the
amazon light sale account page if i
click on this
and we scroll down you can see here this
is my average
cpu utilization per 5 minute time frame
i'm not going to go into explaining what
burstable zones are
and burst capacity because that's kind
of outside the scope of today's video
and to be perfectly honest i don't fully
understand it myself
it's a very convoluted system if you ask
me
but i'm not a network engineer i'm a
trader and i only know the bare minimum
to get this stuff operating to be honest
with you but what you need to
look out for is if this orange line is
consistently above this
green line that you see here if this
orange line starts spiking up here
that means that your instance is using
more cpu power
than your current plan can sustain in
the long term
so long as your cpu usage is operating
above this green line
this line down here will continue to
decline
until it hits zero i'm not sure what
happens when it hits
zero percent of remaining cpu burst
capacity
i'm guessing your instance just stops
running which is obviously something you
want to avoid
if you have automated scripts running so
basically as you can see here i've had
my instance running
for about oh a few days now three or
four days
starting around here and as you can see
there were times where it was
consistently
operating above this green line now my
configuration of metatrader is extremely
simple i only have pine connector
connected and i've only got one marker
data feed linked up to it so i might be
able to get away with this really cheap
plan
but if your configuration of metatrader
is using a lot of cpu power you might
need to upgrade to the 12
a month plan instead of the eight dollar
a month the easiest way to do that
if you've already configured your server
for the eight dollar plan
and you notice that this orange line is
constantly
far above the screen line then if you
come up to snapshots
click on that and then if you stop your
instance so if you click on this
stop button that will stop your instance
it'll basically turn off your virtual
server
now if you come down here name your
server to something else like
metatrader server 2 for example and then
click on the create button
that will create a snapshot or a copy of
your current instance configuration so
everything we just did in today's video
will be saved
and you can create a new instance on a
different plan
with exactly the same setup that we have
already configured
so you can see down here here's a
snapshot i created to test the 12
plan all i have to do is click on this
little drop down box these are this
whatever you call this
hamburger icon or whatever it's called
and then click
create new instance and then you can set
this new instance up as if it was
a fresh instance so you can choose your
location and you can choose a new
instance plan so if you're just using
pine connector but your metatrader
platform seems to be consuming a lot of
cpu
resources you might want to upgrade to
the 12 plan
and if you're running a bunch of expert
advisors
or particularly complex scripts and
you're using significantly more cpu
power
you might need to go for the 20 plan i
don't think you'll need to exceed the 20
plan to run metatrader no matter how
complicated your scripts are
but that's just something to keep in
mind so if i click on that
and scroll down we can name our instance
so i'm going to call mine meta trader
server
20 for 20 a month and then i'm going to
click create instance
and now amazon light sale is going to
boot up
a new copy of my original instance
under the new plan with extra cpu power
and extra
ram so if you need to upgrade your
instance because
it is consuming too much of your lower
plans resources
this is the easiest and quickest way to
do it once this instance is up and
running like this one is
you'll be able to connect to it the same
way we did to our original server
and the password will be the same for
this server as well
as your original server so keep that in
mind you'll connect to this new ip
address
with the same password as your original
instance
so make sure to save that password
somewhere safe if you do
need to copy your instance because once
you've copied it you are going to need
to delete
the old instance otherwise you'll get
charged for it even though you're not
using it
now i don't need this 20 a month plan so
i'm just going to delete this now
click yes delete and i'm going to
restart
my original instance all right so
that'll do it for today's lesson i hope
you found this interesting
and most importantly helpful now keep in
mind what we've done today
applies to any expert advisor so if
you're using
any other expert advisor other than pi
connector to auto trade
through metatrader you can use the same
steps we did today to set up amazon web
services to auto trade
24 7 on a remote server so that you
don't need to leave your home computer
running
at all times so i'll wrap it up there
thanks for watching if you haven't
already make sure to hit the subscribe
button because i will be back very soon
with a new
training education video to help you
take your training to the next level
take care good luck out there and i'll
speak with you soon
goodbye