Webhook to MT4 — coming soon, send JSON signals

Risk warning: Trading CFDs and other leveraged products is complex and carries a high risk of losing money rapidly because of leverage. Industry data indicates that 70–80% of retail trading accounts lose money on these products. Risk disclosure · Past performance.

Not available yet: this destination cannot be connected in PipSync today. MetaTrader 5, cTrader, Match-Trader, Binance and Bybit are live; we will update this page when it opens.

The payload is deliberately simple: an instrument, a direction of buy or sell, and entry, sl and tp1 prices. The webhook URL itself carries a secret token and acts as the credential, so any system that can make an HTTPS POST — a screener, a backtest runner, a custom bot — can send signals without keeping a terminal open. PipSync is the hosted layer between your code and your broker accounts, replacing the old MQL4-EA-on-a-VPS stack with a hosted API.

1. 1

   Create your PipSync account and subscribe to a plan

   Sign up at app.pipsync.io (the $0 Free plan needs no card but only parses signals), then subscribe to a plan that includes webhook integration. A payment method is required, and you can cancel any time.

2. 2

   Add your MT4 account

   MetaTrader 4 account connections are coming soon, so there is nothing to connect yet. Note that MT4 is hedging-only, so each signal will open its own position.

3. 3

   Generate your webhook URL

   Go to Settings → Advanced → TradingView Alerts and click Generate webhook URL. The URL contains a secret token, is shown only once and is the credential — keep it private and regenerate it if it ever leaks.

4. 4

   Configure server-side risk rules

   Set fixed-lot or percent-risk sizing, min/max lots and max open positions. These run server-side.

5. 5

   Send a test payload

   POST a sample flat JSON body (instrument, direction, entry, sl, tp1) and check Recent alerts under Settings → Advanced → TradingView Alerts to confirm PipSync interprets it correctly.

6. 6

   Test on demo, then go live

   Once MT4 connections are available, start with a demo account, then switch to your live account when the behaviour matches your expectations.

Typical setup time: about 11 minutes.

A webhook to MT4 expects a single flat JSON object, not a nested or templated structure. Five fields are required: instrument, direction (buy or sell), entry, sl and tp1. There is no close action — a direction other than buy or sell is rejected.

entry, sl and tp1 are absolute prices above 0 — a payload with 0 is rejected, not read as market. Every other field, including lots and comment, is ignored: sizing always comes from your PipSync settings.

• instrument: the symbol, e.g. EURUSD (upper-cased, letters and digits only)
• direction: buy or sell (long and short also work); there is no close action
• entry: absolute entry price, above 0
• sl: absolute stop-loss price, above 0
• tp1: at least one absolute take-profit price, above 0 (tp1 to tp5 for several)
• other fields: ignored, including lots and comment

The webhook URL is the credential: each source gets its own unique HTTPS endpoint containing a secret token, so possession of the URL is what authorises a signal. Treat it like a password — never publish it, and send only over HTTPS.

If a URL is ever exposed, regenerate it under Settings → Advanced → TradingView Alerts to invalidate the old one immediately. Inbound requests are also rate-limited; on an HTTP 429 your client should back off with jitter and retry.

MT4 automation was historically built around an MQL4 expert advisor running inside a terminal on a rented VPS, which had to stay online to receive and act on signals. PipSync removes that entire stack: it accepts your JSON over HTTPS in the cloud, with MT4 execution through a hosted bridge coming soon, so there is no EA to compile, no terminal to keep open, and no VPS to maintain.

Because execution lives in the cloud, signals are processed even when your own computer is off. The trade-off to know is that MT4 is hedging-only with no netting concept, so each buy or sell opens a distinct position rather than offsetting an opposite one — a key difference from MT5.

You get three layers of feedback. The dashboard shows every parsed signal and resulting order on all plans, so you can audit exactly what arrived and what PipSync did with it.

For programmatic feedback, PipSync sends signed outbound webhooks for events such as trade.opened, trade.closed, tp_hit and sl_hit, each carrying an HMAC-SHA256 signature in the X-PipSync-Signature header and retried up to five times with backoff. A REST read API (GET /v1/signals and GET /v1/trades, documented in OpenAPI 3.1) lets you poll state directly; the read API is part of the Enterprise plan.

The JSON payload and the webhook-URL credential model are identical, so your sending code does not change between the two. The difference is in how the destination platform handles positions: MT4 is hedging-only with no netting, meaning each signal opens its own position and opposite trades coexist.

MT5 supports both netting and hedging accounts and can apply partial fills, so an opposite order may reduce or close an existing net position depending on the account type. If your strategy assumes opposite signals offset each other, that behaviour exists on MT5 netting accounts but not on MT4, where each signal stays its own position.