Explain the expert advisor that you want to build using my conversation starters. You don’t need to worry about creating anything technical – that’s my job. Just talk to me like you’re teaching a trading buddy your exciting, new strategy. I’m a forex trader, too.

When you’re ready to discuss your EA idea with the best programming service,  you can reach me in a number of different ways:

• Call me. My direct line is (817) 210-4019, too.
• Email me. The company email address is info@onestepremoved.com.
• You can find me on Skype. My user name is “OneStepRemoved.com”.

Pricing Guide

Programming conversation starters

1. What indicators does your Expert Advisor use?
2. When should you enter the market with a buy and sell trade?
3. When should you exit?
4. What forex money management options do you want to use?

Build your Expert Advisor

The First Step To Building Your Expert Advisor – Communication

Most traders don’t care about MetaTrader programming or software development. Your focus is on trading. It’s our job to take your idea and turn it into an Expert Advisor.

Don’t feel like you have to write your strategy in computer speak or pseudo code if you’re not comfortable doing so. Instead, pretend like you’re emailing a trading buddy. Write a quick email to info@onestepremoved.com. That email will help me understand what you hope to accomplish.

If your strategy isn’t clear, that’s ok. I speak English and I’m not shy about asking questions. Neither are any of my programmers. It’s one of the benefits of working with an American company that has a real phone number and responds within one business day.

You should also watch the YouTube! video posted below. It explains some of the more common issues encountered when communicating a strategy.

What to Expect

Sometimes, the hardest part of building an EA is not the MQL programming; it’s the communicating and testing. Here’s how a typical project (less than 10 hours) goes:

• The customer tries to explain the concept for the expert advisor. 1-2 weeks.
• The actual programming work. A maximum of 5 business days.
• The customer tries to explain problems that he has never explained before. We fix them and send a new version. The cycle repeats. 2-4+ weeks

All of our projects are pay for time. About 10% of the time is spent writing source code. We will spend the remaining 90% of the time discussing bugs, finding ways to improve the strategy and resolving communication conflicts. Chances are that you’ve never ordered or built custom software in the past. That’s ok – most of my customers are just like you.

Expert Advisor and Custom Indicator Delivery

Delivery of the initial expert advisor or custom indicator takes 5 business days from the date of payment, unless specified otherwise.

All support happens over phone and email. I generally communicate with you in the way same way that you initiate communication with me. If you’re a phone person, then I generally pick up the phone and call you when you have a question. If you’re an email person, I’ll communicate over email.

Building software is an oddly personal process because of the amount of communication required. It’s inevitable when you spend time working together on a shared goal that you build friendships in the process. Chances are that we’ll finish the project as friends.

Testing Your Expert Advisor

The initial version of an Expert Advisor almost never comes out as a final, polished product. While I as the programmer test the product, a difference exists between running an EA on backtests versus using the file in real life.

Almost all software companies hire a quality assurance engineer to test software. That profession exists for a reason. Testing software takes a lot of work.

Many of our customers are retail forex traders seeking to keep costs down. The most obvious way to reduce cost is to have you, the customer, do the testing.

Even the most trivial EAs usually require several hours of testing to find the little bugs. You are also probably not a quality assurance engineer, and thus not comfortable explaining what exactly doesn’t work. We fully expect that you are inexperienced communicating software concepts or problems and reflect that in the estimated time.

The customer is the only person that can fully communicate the requirements. Therefore, that person has to do real work. You should expect to spend a significant amount of time verifying that the software functions as intended and sending documentation like screen shots and log files.

A defined process exists for communicating Expert Advisor issues. Most novices report general issues such as the “trailling stop does not work properly”. Whenever these types of issues arise, expect the project manager to ask for MetaTrader log files, screen shots and an written overview of the problem. Although the problem may appear obvious, that is probably not the case for the person on the receiving end of the information. The process aims to reverse engineer your thought process, which in turn leads to the clearest description of the problem. The process also involves some degree of computer literacy on the part of the customer.

Ironing out the bugs, great and small, takes anywhere from 2-4+ weeks from the date of delivery for a typical. Some of that stems from our need to communicate consistently with all customers. Some of it results from waiting for the market to do something that causes the Expert Advisor to act incorrectly.

OneStepRemoved.com answers tech support requests within 1 business day.

Next steps

You already put in a lot of effort to find the best MetaTrader programmers around. Even if your idea isn’t clear yet, you should email info@onestepremoved.com. A free consultation with me, Shaun Overton, can save you a lot of wasted time and effort.

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