To all, As a fairly new Metastock user, I wanted to say "Thanks" to Jose for the valuable information you have shared which has helped me to learn EA programming with MS. I'm very familiar with MetaTrader ... yet would prefer to use MS which is much easier to program! I have 2 questions: I have written a working EA using Alerts. However, once an alert is triggered, MS 9.1 continues to give alert notifications as long as the alert conditions are true. Is there a way to "latch" an alert? What I mean is...once an alert is triggered, there is only 1 Alert notification until either the alert conditions are false or another alert condition is triggered. For instance, a Long Entry condition is true...the Alert is triggered...an alert notification is sent...and then the Alert is latched so not to send out more alerts for the Long Entry. The latch remains in effect until the Long Entry condition is false, or the Long Exit condition is true. I've attempted to use Roy's external function "latch" but it doesn't seem to work...or I haven't coded it correctly. Also, can an Alert notification be written to a file? I'd like the Alert notification to be able to write to an external file that is waiting to collect information. It can be in a file format of .xls, .csv, or .txt. Or, it can be a numerical value such as a 1 for a DDE. If MS 9.1 cannot do this, does the MS Developer's Kit allow this? Thank you, Dean Malone