Chapter 3 [Second Part]: The Blood-迷った Right Hand and the Resolve to Create Something of One's Own
VII. The Darkness of MetaEditor and the Endless Whack-a-Mole of Errors
After enduring a crushing loss of 860,000 yen and steeling my resolve to survive, I sat back down in front of the PC.
In the center of the screen rose the MetaEditor, the programming environment bundled with MT4. What met my eyes was a line of English words and symbols arranged against a pitch-black background.
Late at night after finishing the rounds of sales, with my family asleep. I began hammering the keyboard with trembling hands, staring at introductory books and overseas developer forums until my eyes nearly bled.
C++
int OnInit()
{
return(INIT_SUCCEEDED);
}
void OnTick()
{
// Here, write the defensive logic to catch the waves of the market
}
I had never touched programming at all in my life up to that point. Variable type declarations, function scopes, arrays… With every added line of code, the toolbox at the bottom of the screen relentlessly displayed red "Compile Error" warnings in rows.
'(' - semicolon expected
'OrderSend' - wrong parameters count
'}' - unbalanced parentheses
“Is the semicolon missing? Are the parentheses unbalanced? … What did I do wrong!?”
One o'clock in the morning. I glared at the screen, continuing a mole-whacking task, hunting for typos one by one. The wall of code mercilessly blocked a head that was exhausted from daytime sales work.
“If I outsource it, maybe someone could make it for a few tens of thousands of yen. But as long as I rely on others, when a storm of the market arrives I’ll be overwhelmed by my own fear and intervene manually. ‘If I don’t write line by line myself and know every corner of the mechanism, true trust will not take root’”
Cooling my heavy eyelids with cold water, I continued to fight the errors.
VIII. The Birth Cry at 2 AM — The Moving Moment of “Hello World” —
After days of struggle, that moment finally arrived.
The instant I clicked the “Compile” button at the top-right of the screen, the text appeared in the log panel at the bottom.
Plaintext
0 errors, 0 warnings
“… it passed.”
The red warnings disappeared, and errors dropped to zero. I opened the backtest window and dragged and dropped the minimal script I had written onto a chart.
2022.06.28 02:15:00 GoldenWheatReaper USDHPY,M5: Hello World! Our impregnable ship is born here.
“It worked…!”
I had earned no profit of even 1 yen. It was merely the Hello World in the programming world, where one prints text on the screen. But to me, it was the priceless first birth cry when my own will and commands began to move through the computer’s flesh for the first time.
A warmth gradually rose in my clenched fist on the desk. It wasn’t about moving someone else’s system with fear, nor gambling with my own uncertain right hand. The “fully self-made impregnable ship” to protect my family’s future was now giving its first cry in this darkness.
IX. The Pocket Notebook in the Chest and the Cultivated Design
From that day, my daily life completely changed.
As I walked the streets as a salesman for the company, whenever a market idea popped into my head, I would pull out my smartphone and jot it down in a notes app.
‘Is it the collapse of trying to catch a sudden trend with a single logic?’ ‘What happens if I run contrarian and trend-following on separate layers asynchronously?’ ‘How do I write code to prevent multiple positions clustering in the same price range?’
My mind, once focused on how to get rich quickly, was now filled with a defensive philosophy: how to endure all shocks of the market and build a structure that never sinks.
Rather than chasing immediate explosive profits through “slash-and-burn farming,” I wrote code as if deeply tilling the荒れた大地 rough terrain to yield crops rich for years to come.
It was the muddy, stubborn voyage to move away from a “copy band” made from scattered online code toward completing a “true original song.”