Order History Indicator

In this article, we will review the Order History indicator, a valuable tool for visualizing your past trades directly on your charts. We'll cover how to add the indicator to a chart, configure its settings, and utilize its features to gain deeper insights into your trading performance. 

The Order History indicator draws your historic trades on a chart, showing the entry and exit prices and times, and also displays bands which indicate when you were in and out of the market. 

In the following example, individual historic trades for the chart symbol (EUR/USD) are shown as entry and exit arrows with a connecting line. The blue bands at the bottom of the screen indicate when there was an open position for the chart symbol, and the grey bands indicate when there was an open position in any other symbol. Switching between different chart timeframes (D1, H1, M1, etc.) in effect provides a way of zooming in on historic trading activity. 

Hovering the mouse over a historic trade shows the details of that trade: 

Hovering the mouse over the blue or grey bands shows the details of the trades which were open during that period: 

How to Install Order History indicator? 

To download and install the Pro Trading Tools, please follow these steps:  

1. Log in to Alpari profile > Hub > Pro Trading Tools

2. Download FX Blue or Trading Central for your Platform (Meta Trader 4 or Meta Trader 5) 

3. Run the downloaded FX Blue and Trading Central files and apply them to your chosen MetaTrader Platform when prompted. 

4. Relaunch the MetaTrader platform. You’ll find your FX Blue* and Trading Central tools in the ‘Navigator panel under ‘Indicators’ and/or ‘Expert Advisors’. 

Note: FX Blue tools will appear in MetaTrader labeled as Alpari or Figaro app suite. 

Using the Order History indicator 

Adding the indicator to a chart 

You add the Order History indicator to a chart in the usual MT4 way, either by dragging it from the Navigator onto a chart or by double-clicking on it in the Navigator. You can also use standard MT4 features such as adding the indicator to your list of Favorites, or assigning a Hotkey to it. 

The indicator can be configured in a number of ways using the settings on its Inputs tab, as described below. 

Open trades 

You can choose whether the indicator should include current open trades. 

Entry and exit markers 

The indicator draws entry and exit markers for each individual trade on the chart’s symbol. You can choose whether these are colour-coded based on win versus loss, or on buy versus sell. 

You can also set the style of entry and exit marker (arrows, price labels, etc.) and the width of the line between the markers. 

Stop-loss and take-profit 

You can choose to turn on extra lines showing any stop-loss and take-profit on each trade. You can set both the style of the line and its colour. 

Please note: the prices which are shown are the final (or current) stop-loss and take-profit for a trade. MT4 does not maintain a record of previous s/l and t/p levels for a trade. 

Trade Description 

Hovering the mouse over the markers or line for a historic trade displays pop-up information such as the following: 

You can change the summary text which is displayed for each order using the indicator’s settings. You can use the following variables in the text. Please note that these pop-up messages are limited in length by MT4 and will not be displayed if they exceed 256 characters. 

Activity bands 

The blue and grey bands at the bottom of the chart indicate when there was an open trade for the chart symbol (blue) and for any other symbol (grey). Hovering the mouse over these bands again displays a pop-up summary of the trades open during the period. 

You can control the colour and size of the bands using the indicator’s settings. 

The bands are affected by any filtering which you use. The blue band in fact illustrates all the trades for the current chart symbol which match the filtering. The grey band illustrates all trades for all other symbols, plus any trades for the current chart symbol which do not match the filtering. 

Filtering 

You can use filter to control which historic trades are drawn on the chart as markers, and which trades are included in the blue versus grey activity bands. 

You can filter on several different conditions: buy or sell, lot size, open time, close time, MT4 magic number, order comment, and amount of net profit. For example, you can draw only your historic losing trades by setting the maximum net profit to zero.