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Kais Bhir
Kais Bhir

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Building a Multi-Timeframe Smart Money Concepts Engine in MQL4 (Months of Work, Thousands of Zones)

Building a Multi-Timeframe Market Structure Engine in MQL4

Over the past few months, I’ve been building a large-scale Smart Money Concepts (SMC) research engine in MQL4 focused on detecting and tracking market structure across multiple timeframes.

The project evolved from simple Fair Value Gap (FVG) detection into a complete visualization and backtesting system capable of handling:

  • Fair Value Gaps (FVGs)
  • Swing Highs / Swing Lows
  • Swing Breaks
  • Multi-timeframe confluence
  • Bullish/Bearish zones
  • “Golden Zones” (H4 zones merged with D1 structure)

One of the biggest challenges was engineering a proper zone lifecycle system inside MetaTrader 4:

  • zone creation
  • extension
  • mitigation
  • truncation
  • invalidation
  • object cleanup

The goal was not simply generating buy/sell signals, but building a framework capable of analyzing which structural patterns remain statistically consistent across thousands of historical market scenarios.

The project is now evolving toward:

  • large-scale backtesting
  • CSV-based analytics pipelines
  • Python/vectorBT integration
  • AI-assisted market pattern research

Stack

MQL4, Python, Pandas, Plotly, Dash, MetaTrader 4

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