Trading Cost Board
A 2 pip spread means nothing on its own. On EURUSD, whose daily range often runs 80-100 pips, it is trivial. On a quiet exotic cross with a 25 pip daily range, the same 2 pips can be 8% of the whole day's expected movement before a single price tick moves in your favour. Trading Cost Board reads every symbol currently in Market Watch and computes, per symbol: the live spread, an estimated round-turn commission (converted from a flat account-currency-per-lot input into price units via that symbol's own tick value and tick size), and the worse of the long/short overnight swap - then divides the total by the completed prior day's high-low range and shows the result as a percentage, colour-coded once it crosses a warn or alert threshold. The naive version of this tool just prints spread in points, which is meaningless across instruments with different pip values, digit counts and typical ranges. Expressing cost as a share of the symbol's own recent range makes it directly comparable across a JPY pair, a metal and a major in one glance, which is the whole point of a cost board rather than a spread column. Daily range is read from the last COMPLETED D1 bar (shift 1), not the in-progress current day, specifically so the percentage does not artificially shrink toward zero in the minutes right after a new trading day opens and then climb back up all session - a subtle but real distortion the naive "use today's bar" approach introduces. Notes and limitations Commission is a flat user-supplied figure, not read from the broker - MQL4 has no general API to query commission schedules, so this is only as accurate as the number entered. Swap uses the worse of the long/short side because the trader does not yet know which direction they will end up holding; it therefore slightly overstates cost for whichever side turns out cheaper. A symbol with no completed D1 history yet (freshly added to Market Watch) falls back to a small point-based floor rather than dividing by zero, and will show an unrealistically high %RANGE until real history exists.
Indicator · MT5 · v1.0 · Free
About Trading Cost Board
Trading Cost Board is an indicator for MetaTrader 5. It has 11 settings, such as Max symbols, Commission per lot and Refresh seconds. MQL source code included.
Files in the download: TradingCostBoard.ex5, TradingCostBoard.mq5, TradingCostBoard.txt.
Settings
| Setting | Default | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Max symbols | 20 | Maximum Market Watch symbols to list |
| Commission per lot | 0.0 | Round-turn commission per 1.0 lot, in account currency |
| Refresh seconds | 5 | Seconds between panel refreshes |
| Corner | CORNER_LEFT_UPPER | Panel corner (0-3, ENUM_BASE_CORNER) |
| X offset | 12 | Panel X offset in pixels |
| Y offset | 18 | Panel Y offset in pixels |
| Text color | clrWhiteSmoke | Colour on the chart |
| Warn color | clrOrange | Text colour once cost exceeds InpWarnPercent |
| Alert color | clrTomato | Text colour once cost exceeds InpAlertPercent |
| Warn percent | 15.0 | Cost-as-%-of-range warn threshold |
| Alert percent | 30.0 | Cost-as-%-of-range alert threshold |
How to install
- Download the ZIP from your PolyMaria library and unzip it.
- In MetaTrader 5 open File → Open Data Folder, then go to MQL5 → Indicators.
- Copy the .mq5 file(s) there. Put any .mqh files in MQL5 → Include.
- Open the .mq5 file in MetaEditor and press Compile (F7) if MetaTrader does not show it.
- Drag the indicator from the Navigator onto a chart and adjust the settings.
Tags: EURUSD · MT5 Indicator · MQL5 Source Code