Our First Beta Update: What's New in PineHook 0.0.9

Hi, Gabriel here. After months of building and testing PineHook behind closed doors with a small group of alpha testers, we were proud to open the public beta three weeks ago and hand PineHook to the world.

Since launch, testers have been running PineHook under conditions we could never have staged ourselves: different brokers, home PCs and VPSes, strategies firing at every hour of the day. Your suggestions keep landing in our inbox through the dashboard, and for the first time, we're able to watch the system work across a broader range of real setups than our own accounts could ever give us. It's incredible to see!

In total, around 50,000 alerts have passed through the relay since the beta opened, at an average of 51 milliseconds each on our side of the wire. Today's EA and DLL update improves on those numbers by up to 40%.

Which brings us to today. Version 0.0.9 is the first release shaped by the beta itself. Indeed, most of what's in it exists thanks to feedback from someone who ran PineHook for real these past three weeks and told us what was missing, with speed being only one part of it, so we'd love to take a moment and walk you through the new features and improvements waiting for you.

Coming from PineConnector? Bring your alerts as they are#

The most requested feature since launch, by a wide margin, is the ability to move from PineConnector to PineHook without changing the syntax of your already-existing alerts. This is now live on the most recent version of our EA.

When connecting the EA to your chart, you can now change the new Signal Syntax Mode input to PineConnector Compatibility and PineHook will read your existing PineConnector alert messages directly: same commands, same parameters, same underlying logic.

That last part matters more than it sounds. A few of PineConnector's systems behave differently from PineHook's native ones, and an alert you programmed and tested against those behaviors expects them. For example, PineConnector treats a stop loss of zero as a request to move the stop to breakeven, so in compatibility mode, we do too. The mode offers parity with what your alerts were written to expect. Chasing down every one of those behavioral differences is what made this corner of 0.0.9 a much larger undertaking than it looks.

Migrating takes three edits. Put your PineHook license key where the old license ID was, point the webhook at us, and set that one EA input. Your Pine Script and your alert templates stay as they are, because the whole point of the mode is that nothing else has to change.

The full command reference covers every supported command and parameter, and if you're still weighing the move, the PineConnector alternative page makes the case point by point.

One alert, all of your accounts#

The trade copier is my favorite of the batch, and honestly, it's been ready for a while but we held it out of the launch lineup because we wanted to test it further before putting it in everyone's hands.

It gives you a Copier ID in the same format as a license key, and you use it in your TradingView alert exactly where the license key normally goes. Every license you attach to the copier (in your dashboard) receives the alert at the same moment, each scaled by its own lot multiplier. So if you run one strategy across a live account, a demo, and two prop-firm challenges, you now maintain one alert instead of four.

The multiplier scales every sizing mode including the percentage-based ones, because we treat it as a risk knob rather than a lot-size knob. For example, set your tightest account to 0.5x and every alert it receives carries half the risk, however you size your entries.

Copiers never trade on their own, don't take up a license slot, and can be protected by signal authentication, just like a license. Setup lives on the Licenses page of your dashboard, and the trade copier guide walks through it.

A news filter for the red-folder days#

High-impact news releases are where spreads widen and slippage does its worst work, and plenty of strategies are simply not meant to enter into that. Worse, some strategies work perfectly fine until they get assaulted by the craziness of major news price action. Often, you end up in positions you had no business getting into, because a level was triggered by an irrational, unusually wild price swing that only lasts a few seconds to a few minutes.

The new news filter holds new entries inside a window you choose on either side of high-impact economic releases. It holds entries and nothing else: closes, cancels, and the management of trades already open are never touched, because a filter that keeps you from exiting would be worse than no filter at all.

The filter can be set globally or per license. The calendar it works from sits in your dashboard, so you can see ahead of time which events would hold an alert and when.

Drawdown protection that measures the way your prop firm does#

Until now, drawdown protection measured from your equity at the daily reset, and that stays the default. However, prop firms don't all measure drawdown the same way, so 0.0.9 adds four more modes: trailing from your floating equity peak, trailing from your closed-balance peak, static from a level you set, and relative as a percentage of your highest account value. You can express the limit as a percentage or a currency amount, and you choose what a breach does: block new entries, close everything, or both.

For example, on a $100,000 account with a 5% trailing limit, the EA keeps a $5,000 floor behind your equity peak, so at a $108,000 peak the floor sits at $103,000. That mirrors how most prop firms track it, which is the point: the EA can now enforce the same rule your firm will judge you by, before the firm does. The full breakdown of all five modes is in the EA configuration guide.

Symbol mapping for brokers with their own spelling#

Some brokers insist on their own spelling for instruments, one that often diverges from TradingView's naming scheme. Your alert might indicate EURUSD, but the account you trade uses EURUSD.micro instead. The EA then goes looking for a symbol that isn't there and the trade fails.

Symbol mapping lets you set that translation up once and forget about it. You keep writing EURUSD in your alerts, that's also what your dashboard shows, and the broker's spelling appears nowhere except on the order itself.

Most people will never need this, especially if you own or have access to your TradingView strategy's code, but if your broker has naming ideas of its own, the symbol mapping guide shows you exactly what to set.

And then there's the speed#

The up-to-40% figure at the top of this blog post comes from a long round of profiling the path an alert takes from the moment it reaches your terminal to the moment it becomes an order. We reworked the hottest parts of that path in both the EA and the DLL, trimmed delays in the handshake between them, and measured until we trusted the result.

Our most recent measurements of the new update come in at an average of 30 milliseconds per alert, down from the 51 we averaged across the first three weeks. I'll admit we obsessed over this one because latency is the number people compare relays by, but every one of those changes went through the same test suites as the rest of the release before it shipped so it comes at no cost.

The smaller things#

A release is mostly its headline features, but a few quieter changes in 0.0.9 deserve a mention.

The new id= parameter fixes a subtle trap. PineHook drops identical webhook messages that arrive within about 12 seconds of each other, which is what stops a TradingView retry from filling your order twice. The catch is that a strategy firing the very same order twice on purpose, say a scale-in that adds an identical position, got caught by that same guard. Now, give each firing its own id= value and both go through, while real retries are still dropped. The signal formatting guide shows how to build one in Pine Script or straight from the alert dialog.

Beyond that, Signal Logs now show more information about each alert, the daily loss guard got sturdier against edge cases and false positives, and the EA handles reconnection storms more gracefully when a terminal or network keeps dropping and coming back.

How to update#

Grab the new bundle from the downloads page of your dashboard, replace the EA and DLL files in MetaTrader 5, and re-attach the EA to your chart. If you manage your settings from the dashboard, they follow you automatically. If you configure the EA through its inputs instead, give them a quick check after the swap.

What's next#

A few things are already on the bench for the short term. First, we'll be opening up our referral system, and it will come with a revenue-sharing mechanism, because if you bring people to PineHook we think you should get a cut of what they pay. Second, we're working on bringing PineHook to new platforms, with cTrader and DXtrade at the front of the line and more behind them, so the same alerts can drive whichever terminal your account lives on.

And third, less glamorous but just as deliberate: we'll be watching the system closely for stability and listening to your feedback as 0.0.9 settles in. A release this size earns its trust in the weeks after it ships, not the day of, and we'd rather spend that time monitoring than rushing the next thing out.

Keep telling us what to fix#

A good part of this release started life as a message someone sent us through the dashboard, and that's how we intend to keep working. If 0.0.9 breaks something, tell us. If it's missing something, tell us that too. We read every single one.

Thanks for testing with us. The first three weeks have been better than we dared hope, and it's because you showed up.

Gabriel J., Co-founder