To enter the trader mode of FSB Pro you have to choose if from the drop down menu. This is the main tool that allows you to trade using FSB Pro and MT4.

The toolbar consists of two general-purpose buttons: one that opens the strategy description, which you can edit, as you could in the strategy builder mode; the other button opens the Trade Settings panel.

The Trade Settings panel has only one option. However, it is a very important one. This is the number of bars that FSB Pro will ask for from the MT4 chart. FSB Pro will use your strategy and the historical data from the chart to auto trade. (FSB Pro will require at least 300 bars to work with, but if you set a higher number than that and MT4 does not provide the full data, FSB Pro will still work. This is why we named the option “recommended bars” and not “required bars”.)

The default value for this field is 300 bars, but some indicators might require more. For example, such an indicator is Exponential Moving Average. This indicator will use all historical data available.

You have to make sure your indicators are getting enough bars, so they can have stable values.

To apply the new number of recommended bars you have to start a new connection or restart the already working ones.

The zoom in and out buttons will allow you to toggle the additional details of the slots in the strategy layout panel.

Here you can enter a unique connection ID to connect to an MT4 chart. You can read more about this process in Connecting to a MT4 Chart

This panel shows you the strategy properties and indicators, but you cannot change it while trading. If you do want to make any changes to it, you have to close any open connections first and then enable Builder mode.

The connection boxes show detailed information about each connection. The boxes include data about the status of the connection (“Not trading” / “Now trading”) and a button to connect or disconnect to the MT4 chart.

Below you can see the ID of the connection that corresponds directly to the ID you entered in the MT4 chart indicator options. The data in this line appears in the following order: ID, Symbol, period, Bid / Ask prices, the MT4 Server Time.

The third line shows the status of the position.

When there is an open position, the information shown will be as follows: Direction of the position (in lots), opening price of the position, Stop Loss, Take Profit (if none – both values will be zero) and floating Profit Loss.

You can close a connection, only when you are not trading. In other words, you have to stop the trading from the “Stop” button to make the “Close” button appear in the upper right corner.

The “wifi-like” icon in the connection box shows the stability of the connection to MT4 (not the connection to internet or the broker, but between the two programs).

• Four green bars means that MT4 is receiving tick data.
• Three green bars – MT4 has not received any tick data within one second or more. This will force FSB Pro to send a request for data to MT4, if MT4 is running, it will respond and the icon will stay at three green bars or move to four, if there is new data.
• Two orange bars – FSB Pro cannot connect to MT4. FSB Pro is not receiving tick data and it is not getting any response to the data requests it sent to MT4. This status is temporary and will hold only for 30 seconds. When the 30 seconds are over, the next icon option will appear.
• One red bar – FSB Pro has had no sign of connection to MT4 for more than 30 seconds. FSB Pro will still keep the connection open.
• All bars are white – After one minute without any response from MT4, FSB Pro will close the connection. This will result in an all-white-bar icon. If this happened because you have closed MT4 and/or the FSB Expert, and you run both things again, FSB Pro should reconnect to the chart on its own.

In the tabs described below, you can see information that FSB Pro obtained from its connection with MT4. This information is actually more detailed than the information you can see in MT4 without using programming. All the information in the Terminal Feed and the Connection Status concerns only the currently selected connection.

The Terminal Feed has three tabs (see below): Feed, Market and Account.

The feed tab shows you information about the current state of your position and account statistics.

Account profit - is the sum of all open connections’ profits.

Positions profits – this parameter refers only to the current connection’s position.

Here you can see all the MT4 trading settings, which FSB Pro has obtained.

The parameters of your account, again, obtained from MT4.

Holds a log of the connection’s status reports. Consists of opening, closing, automatic trading start and stop, as well as disconnect log entries.

From this panel, you can open positions manually. If you open a position manually, FSB Pro will apply it to the selected connection’s chart. Using this tool will not interfere with the automatic trading.

The first line shows the trading size, the symbol, the period and the server time. You can enter short and long positions using the buttons on the next line. You can use the buttons to close or open positions. For example, if your strategy has opened a long position of 0.01 lots, you can close it by selling 0.01 lots manually.

Below the buttons are four fields that allow you to set additional properties of the position. If the values are set to zero (those are like that by default), the zero-value filed will not be applied to the trading order. It is important to remember that all those fields are set in points. Points might be different from pips, depending on your broker’s rules.

The “Modify” button does not sell or buy. It only changes the four fields: Stop Loss, Trailing Stop, Take Profit and Break Even. Clicking this button will only change the current position’s protections. If you set an existing protection value to zero and click “Modify”, FSB Pro will remove it from the position.

The “Close” button closes the current position.

This tab shows statistics about the data that FSB Pro is using the trade the strategy. This is not the historical data that FSB Pro uses in the backtest, but the data that it gets from the MT4 chart.

Usually the trader will use only the data from the MT4 chart to which it has connected. This is not always true. You can set different indicators from the same strategy to use a different market to take data from when trading.

You can use the “Export” button (upper right corner of the panel) to export this data in a CSV File so you can analyze this data in Excel or another CSV or text file editor.

When you are trading, the Status Bar will display information about your account’s properties. The information in it is the sum of all strategies that you are trading.