I did a little searching and found a really old very simple free EA that records the brokers spread from a currency pair to a CSV text file you can open with excel or a text viewer. I made a couple of modifications that add the year and add decimal point in the spread.
It works great. I have only been running it for a few hours today on a forex.com Pro MT4 account after the market opened without a hitch. Can't wait to running it all week during
fapturbo Trading hours. I currently have Alpari US and Forex.com Pro (lower spreads) accounts. The Alpari account is pretty consistent with with its fixed spreads day and night and I never have any issue trading it with FT. But the Forex.com account does get a bunch of "spread is too high errors in FT" So I wanted to see what the spreads really were during those hours.
It's really easy to setup. Just drop it in your Experts folder, restart MT4 add it to a NEW blank chart with the pair you want to track, Uncheck all Live trading and Safety check boxes and click ok. You will get an unhappy face for the EA on the top right of the chart but it is working! (If you want to change the face to happy just Check both Live Trading boxes in the settings(It will not do any trading)).
Now go to you MT4's
experts folder and then into the
Files folder there you will have a new CSV file with the name of the currency pair in the chart. This file can be opened in excel and sorted or just open it in a text file. The size of the CSV file stays pretty small but will eventually add up over a long period of time. Should be fine for a week worth of data, just keep an eye on the file size or use the input option mentioned below to limit the logging.
Update - After running it overnight it took up about 250kb per pair, so I am guessing a day might be around 700+kb. Lots of data/fields for excel to import so you might just want to run it for a set period or a day at a time and remove to files from the "files" folder so it can start from scratch again. Anyway do your testing carefully and don't forget and leave it running for too long. Again, it might work really well in reducing the file size/spread samples if you set the "Spread to Check" at a higher spread amount to start collecting above that amount.
There is one option in the experts input tab to set called "Spread to check" enter in the spread amount where you want it to start logging if your brokers spread goes above it.
If anyone can add any new features like fixing the date and time to go into one field each with proper formatting go for it. My Mlq4 coding skills are extremely primitive right now.
The orginal programmer is Rolands Auza from
www.rm-forex.lv. The code is extremely simple and nothing in it appears to be bad. It passes the MetaEditor compile check just fine.
Lets start posting some results to this forum so we can do some comparisons on what brokers have what spread during during which hours. This will be extremely useful for people whos EA's are spread sensitive especially during the Asian session like fapturbo.
Attached is the EA and some examples from the Forex.com account I started running it on.
I will post some live results in the next couple days.
Enjoy,
LM
MT4 Broker Spread Logger EA - records spreads to a CSV file
Linear Mode
