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I'm looking to fetch values of macro- economic announcement data (e.g. interest rate announcements, unemployment figures, consumer price index figures etc.) as soon as/ as near to the time the figures are released from the original source to be used within an MQL4 algorithm written on metatrader4.

At the moment I'm fetching the latest value from Quandl which provides a csv API so that the value can be fetched within an MQL4 script. The issue here lies in that Quandl doesn't update latest values as soon as the sources release them, which is a factor that is very important for my algorithm.

So:

Q. Which sources allow you to fetch real- time LATEST values upon release, to be used within an algorithm?

There doesn't seem to be any documentation on the source websites such as Bureau of Labor Statistics [US], Bank of England [UK] etc. regarding fetching released data values, yet I see online FOREX market calendar websites retrieving latest values sometimes within the second the value is announced- so they must be fetching data from the source?

Examples of the sort of latest values to be fetched:

  • [US] Non- Farm Payroll - source: Bureau of Labor Statistics

  • [GB] Interest Rate Announcement - source: Bank of England

  • [EU] Unemployment Rate - source: Eurostat

To summarise:

  • which sources can I use to fetch a single real- time latest value of an economic announcement as soon as its released? (I understand latency will mean that it won't be fetched immediately)

  • can be fetched using MQL4

p.luck
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2 Answers2

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To get "near real-time", you need to be subscribed to feed services like Bloomberg. But they are expensive. They provide an WebAPI and wrapper interface. There are other online services too, but again, they can be expensive.

Alternative way is for you to "data-scrap" them off those "near real-time" sources (note: gray-area legality).

This method is possible, I've done it. I managed to get it down to ~2sec (near real-time), and am currently using it in one of my MT4 EA project ( TriskM ): https://www.facebook.com/TrackRiskM/photos/a.800008416769352.1073741828.781013552002172/800008486769345

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Basically, in involve 2 parts:

  1. A server application that I host in the cloud. This application's job is to go out and scrape the data, and format it properly for easy downstream consumption.

  2. At the MT4 application (EA) level, you can make HTTP request to the cloud host and request for the info.

user3666197
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jlee88my
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Update: Forex News Gun does not work any more.

The fastest free way to get macroeconomic data in almost real time is a Forex Peace Army Forex News Gun. You get all the economic signals you mentioned, and more, with a delay of less than a second after the release in most cases.

It works like this:
before the actual economic data release, you set up where the program will click in case the number released will be such and such range. At the time of the release ( or better said, when the number arrives at your computer ), if the number is in the specified range, click will occur and you can possibly perform a trade or run a trading algorithm.

For an even faster access, you have to pay a lot of money ( thousands or tens of thousands of dollars monthly ) to financial news providers aka Bloomberg or Thomson-Reuters.

Rok Povsic
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