Trading Session Time Indicator for MT4/MT5
Here you can download our free Trading Session Time indicator for MetaTrader. You will also see how this MT4/MT5 indicator can help you visualize trading sessions and specific times of day.
What are trading session time periods?
Trading instruments can be more active during one part of a day and less active during another part.
For example, when talking about stocks, they are active usually during specific hours, when the stock exchange where they are trading are open.
Forex is a 24-hour market, but generally, currency pairs are more active during the daytime of the countries they belong to. Take for example the AUD/NZD pair — this pair is particularly active in the Asian session while it is more "quiet" during the European and US sessions.
Basically, all trading instruments have periods when there is more activity in them. The same way, there can be specific time of day when some instruments can be effected by regular events. For example, rollovers in the afternoon or during the night, or market opening and close.
For a trader who is trying to study the market and to find strategies, it is important to exploit such an edge. Thus, it is often useful to have a visual representation of such time periods.
A trader can analyze an asset and perhaps spot some behavior traits that happen at the same time of day.
This is particularly important in day trading strategies, where entry and exit normally happen within the same day.
Traders who want to study instruments in such a way can either draw these areas manually or let an automated tool do it for them.
Here you can download Trading Session Time indicator for MT4 and MT5 and, hopefully, it will save you a lot of time.
What is Trading Session Time indicator for MetaTrader?
Trading Session Time indicator for MetaTrader is a tool designed to save your time and efforts. At the same time, it is also helpful to spot possible trading opportunities.
The human brain is very efficient in finding visual patterns. Trading Session Time indicator helps highlight areas on the chart to find these patterns.
Once you specify a time or an interval, the indicator will scan the chart and draw the areas of interest for you.
The indicator is very simple and easy-to-use. Furthermore, it is also flexible enough to satisfy the needs of many traders.
How to use Trading Session Time indicator in MT4 and MT5?
As it has been already mentioned, Trading Session Time indicator is both simple but flexible. With a few options, you can decide to draw lines, areas, rectangles.
There are some generic options and some more specific for the desired function. Here you can see the list of all of its supported input parameters.
Choice of color
You can choose the color of the indicator's drawings, so that it helps you spot what you are trying to spot.
For example, you can make different colors mean different parts of a session. It is for you to simplify the chart's interpretation.
Selection of days
You can enable or disable drawing for some days of the week. For example, you might want to disable drawing for Wednesdays for some reason. The indicator allows you to do that for individual days of the week.
Drawing in the background
All the graphical objects are created in the background of the chart. This allows the candlestick to remain well visible on top of the trading session markup.
Draw Lines at Specific Times
If you specify a start time but not the end time, then the indicator will create a vertical line for every day at the specified time.
This can be useful when you perform studies of behavior at specific time.
Create areas for trading sessions
If you specify the start time and the end time, then the indicator will create areas in the specified interval.
The area will start at the start time and end at the end time. The area will also automatically contain the highs and lows of the interval.
Combine multiple areas or times
One of the most attractive feature of the indicator is its flexibility. If you add multiple instances of the indicator to a chart, you can add different times and different intervals.
To do this:
- Add the indicator multiple times.
- Be careful to assign a different Indicator Name parameter to each instance.
- Select the time or interval.
- Select different colors.
The resulting chart may turn out to be very informative.
Candlestick sessions
You can also choose to display trading sessions as colored Japanese candlesticks. MT5 version of the indicator is better at this because it can display more realistic candlesticks. You can see an example with each weekday drawn using a different color scheme along with session labels and daily range sizes (download the chart template):
MT4 Trading Session Time indicator
As a trader, you might find useful to have a tool that shows you trading session times and other times of day.
When creating an intraday strategy you often need to pick the right time to enter and exit a trade. Your trading rules might be effective at some moment of the day and not at other times. Getting a visual representation of these sessions or times can be very valuable and can save you a lot of time.
With Trading Session Time indicator for MT4, you can:
- Draw an individual line at the time that you specify.
- Draw a rectangle area between two times that you specify.
- Add multiple sessions or lines by adding the indicator multiple times.
- Exclude drawing for some days of the week.
- Highlight with different colors of your preference.
- Spot highs and lows of the sessions.
The indicator will scan the chart and take care of the highlights. This can help in verifying if the entries or exits could be profitable.
It can also help spotting movements that happen at some particular time of day.
MT4 installation instructions
To install the MT4 Trading Session Time indicator, please follow the instructions below:
- Download the indicator archive file.
- Open the MetaTrader 4 data folder (via File->Open Data Folder).
- Open the MQL4 Folder.
- Copy all the folders from the archive directly to the MQL4 folder.
- Restart MetaTrader 4 or refresh the indicators list by right-clicking the Navigator subwindow of the platform and choosing Refresh.
Or you can read a more detailed instruction on how to perform the installation.
MT5 Trading Session Time indicator
You can download Trading Session Time indicator for MetaTrader 5 using the following link:
MT5 installation instructions
To install the MT5 Trading Session Time indicator, please follow the instructions below:
- Download the indicator archive file.
- Open the MetaTrader 5 data folder (via File->Open Data Folder).
- Open the MQL5 Folder.
- Copy all the folders from the archive directly to the MQL5 folder.
- Restart MetaTrader 5 or refresh the indicators list by right-clicking the Navigator subwindow of the platform and choosing Refresh.
Or you can read a more detailed instruction on how to perform the installation.
Conclusion
As you have now learned about Trading Session Time indicator for MT4 and MT5, you can now use it to your advantage. This indicator allows you to visualize colored areas or lines on a chart representing trading sessions or specific times of day.
You can download the indicator for free and use it in your analysis of charts, patterns, price action, and so on. When you feel ready, you could even implement trading restrictions by time for your expert advisors.
Discussion
Do you have any suggestions or questions regarding this indicator? You can always discuss Trading Session Time with the other traders and MQL programmers on the indicators forums.
Changelog
1.02 — 2024-04-15
- Added continuous redraw of trading session area when needed based on the current candle's changes.
- Fixed a major bug in the MT5 version that could render indicator unusable in some cases when the DrawCandles input parameter was set to false.
- Fixed session's range calculation.
1.01 — 2023-05-29
- Added candlesticks display option.
- Added session labels.
- Added session range display.
- Added an option to disable display of a future session.
- Fixed potential
array out rangeerror in MT5.
