Introduction
Deadlines do strange things to traders. Give yourself 24 hours to build an Expert Advisor (EA), and suddenly every idea feels urgent, every bug feels catastrophic, and every cup of coffee feels like rocket fuel. I set out to prove I could design, code, and test an EA in one day. What I got instead was a crash course in chaos management.
The Setup: Ambition Meets Reality
- The plan: A breakout strategy that would trigger trades when price smashed through support or resistance.
- The tools: MetaTrader 5, a pile of old code snippets, and my trusty flowchart sketches.
- The mindset: “It’s just 24 hours. How hard can it be?” Spoiler: very hard.
The Chaos Unfolds
- Compile errors everywhere: My first attempt wouldn’t even run. Missing semicolons, mismatched brackets—it was like the EA was mocking me.
- Logic gone rogue: I forgot to limit trade entries, so the EA opened dozens of positions in seconds. My account looked like confetti.
- Backtest heartbreak: What looked like a genius idea on paper turned into a drawdown disaster in simulation.
- Sleep deprivation: At 3 AM, I was convinced the EA was “almost perfect.” By 9 AM, I realized it was barely functional.
Lessons From the Sprint
- Keep it simple: A minimal EA with one or two conditions beats a rushed Frankenstein of half-baked logic.
- Debugging is the real time sink: Writing code is fast; fixing it is where the hours vanish.
- Pressure distorts judgment: Under the clock, I made decisions I’d never make in a calm setting.
- Prototypes, not products: A 24-hour sprint is great for sparking ideas, but not for shipping a polished EA.
The Silver Lining
Despite the chaos, the sprint gave me something valuable: momentum. I walked away with a prototype, a list of bugs to fix, and a renewed respect for the slow, iterative grind of EA development. Sometimes the best outcome isn’t a finished product—it’s the lessons you carry forward.
Conclusion
Building an EA in 24 hours is like speedrunning trading automation. You’ll learn fast, fail faster, and laugh at the absurdity of watching your EA open 20 trades in a blink. Chaos isn’t the enemy—it’s the teacher.