Don’t you hate it when you step away from the charts and just at that moment, price makes a big move?
You just missed your window of opportunity to enter.
This used to happen to me all the time, as if the charts knew I was doing something else. The charts were right.
I was being frustrated over that missed entry.
These days, one of the key components of my trading system is setting price alerts at certain levels. This accomplishes two goals:
- I will think about how I will respond to price reaching specific levels
- I don’t have to spend hours staring at the charts all the time
There are multiple platforms that can set price alerts. Sometimes, I will use TradingView. Similar functionality is being offered by platforms such as cTrader. However, today I want to look at the price alerting feature in Metatrader 4 (MT4), and how to send email alerts.
Configuring email price alerts in metatrader 4 (MT4)
To start using email alerts in MT4, we first need to do some set-up. Metatrader itself doesn’t have any mail-sending functionality, so we need to use an external mail server for this. First, let’s open the options window (or press Crtl-O):
When you go to the “Email” tab, you should see something like this:
Now, we need a couple of things to make this work. I’m going to use Gmail as an example, since a lot of people are using this email service. However, this should work with any email provider that allows you to login to its SMTP server.
- Step 0: Check the Enable checkbox
- Step 1: fill in the SMTP server. For gmail, this should be smtp.gmail.com:465.
- Step 2: fill in the SMTP login. For gmail, just use your full email address.
- Step 3: fill in the SMTP password. Depending on if you have enabled two-factor authentication (2fa) for your account, you can do two things:
- If you have enabled 2fa, you need to create an app password for Metatrader and use that.
- If you don’t have 2fa enabled, you can just use your email login password.
- Step 4: fill in the from address, e.g. Metatrader alerts, mt4-alerts@example.com
- Step 5: fill in the to address. This is the email address you want to have the email alerts sent to (so probably your own email).
That’s it! I removed my email-address in the screenshot though, don’t want all that spam coming in. You can test the connection and see if everything works. If it’s ok, you should see something like this in the Jounal tab of your Terminal:
Creating the MT4 price alerts
Now the only thing left is to actually create price alerts. Just make sure that you select the right action:
Price alerts will make you a better trader. They force you to think about key levels in a market and how to act on them. Nobody has ever become more profitable by watching the price move tick by tick for hours on end, on the contrary. Use price alerts and get notified at exactly the right time.
Do the Metatrader price alerts work well for you? Let us know in the comments if you run into any difficulties!
