The Price Monitor is an EA for MT4 or MT5 which monitors the prices you are delivering to clients, watching for the following:
- Prices which are failing to move
- Spikes in the spread
- Large price changes (indicating either extreme volatility or a price-feed error)
- Loss of connection to the MT4/5 server
The EA has two distinct advantages over equivalent MT4/5 server plug-ins (plus features such as SMS and its web-based dashboard):
- The EA can detect a complete outage of the MT4/5 server.
- By definition, the EA is monitoring the prices being delivered to clients' desktops. In contrast, use of a server plug-in contains an assumption that prices which have made it into the MT4/5 server and plug-in architecture must be successfully exiting the server architecture.
The EA can send alerts via email and SMS, i.e. redundancy of routes to ensure that alerts are delivered.
The EA can have a global time-window configuration (e.g. only monitor between 00:01 Monday and 20:00 Friday), plus individual time-windows for each symbol (e.g. only monitor DJ30 CFD during US equity market hours, or ignore exotics overnight). Each symbol, or group of symbols, can have different settings for its maximum spread, maximum quote-age etc.
If Microsoft IIS is installed on the same computer as the EA, then it can provide a web-based dashboard showing current spreads and quote-ages, with markers showing any problems. As an incidental benefit, this data can also be collected (in JSON format) in order to provide a real-time quote board for use on a broker's website (and for other purposes).
