Mandatory Cooldown Panel
Revenge trading and over-trading both share a mechanism: a trade closes, the emotional response to it fires, and a new trade goes in within seconds while judgement is still compromised. A discipline rule written on a sticky note does nothing to stop that moment. This EA puts a large, impossible-to-miss panel on the chart that turns red the instant a trade opens and counts down the configured cooldown minutes before turning green again - and it backs the panel with real enforcement, not just a display. No program running in a terminal can reach into the click that sends a manual order and refuse it before the order exists - that is simply how MetaTrader 4 works, and nothing changes that. What this EA does instead is notice a new matching position the moment it appears and close it again, polling on a fast millisecond timer rather than waiting for the next price tick, so a trade opened during the cooldown survives only a few hundred milliseconds before it is closed and logged. Ignoring the panel costs a round-trip spread, not a real trade - close enough to instant that it removes the incentive to test it. The cooldown clock is keyed to whichever matching trade - open or already closed - has the most recent open time, so it resets on every new trade rather than only after a loss, which is the point: this is a pacing control for trading frequency in general, not a loss-streak circuit breaker like a dedicated cooldown-after-losses EA would be. Notes and limitations This EA cannot prevent an order from being sent, only close it again after it appears - a trade that opens and is manually closed by the trader within the poll interval could, in principle, escape notice. It also cannot see trading done from a different terminal or account. The cooldown timer is based on trade open time, not on when a trade closes, so several trades opened in quick succession before the first close does not reset the timer further out than the earliest of them. Treat it as a strong, mostly automatic pacing control, not an absolute guarantee.
Expert advisor · MT4 · v1.0 · Free
About Mandatory Cooldown Panel
Mandatory Cooldown Panel is a script for MetaTrader 4. It can alert you with a pop-up, sound, email or push message. It has 11 settings, such as Cooldown minutes, Magic filter and This symbol only. MQL source code included.
Files in the download: MandatoryCooldownPanel.ex4, MandatoryCooldownPanel.mq4, MandatoryCooldownPanel.txt.
Settings
| Setting | Default | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Cooldown minutes | 15 | Minutes required between trades before a new one is allowed to stand |
| Magic filter | -1 | Magic number watched and enforced, -1 = every magic number |
| This symbol only | false | Restrict watching and enforcement to this chart's symbol only |
| Dry run | false | true = alert only, never closes - use to observe before enforcing |
| Poll ms | 250 | Milliseconds between enforcement checks (timer driven, not tick driven) |
| Max retries | 5 | Attempts per close before giving up |
| Retry wait ms | 300 | Pause between attempts, milliseconds |
| Panel x | 20 | Panel X offset, pixels from the chart corner |
| Panel y | 20 | Panel Y offset, pixels from the chart corner |
| Locked color | clrFireBrick | Panel background while the cooldown is active |
| Ready color | clrDarkGreen | Panel background while ready to trade |
How to install
- Download the ZIP from your PolyMaria library and unzip it.
- In MetaTrader 4 open File → Open Data Folder, then go to MQL4 → Scripts.
- Copy the .mq4 file(s) there. Put any .mqh files in MQL4 → Include.
- Open the .mq4 file in MetaEditor and press Compile (F7) if MetaTrader does not show it.
- Drag the script onto a chart to run it once.
Tags: Alerts · MT4 Expert Advisor · MQL4 Source Code