Progressive lots sizing based on account balance and tracking balance

Hey guys,

Have a question about some code.
Im trying to use a progressive system only when my current account balance is below a 'high' of my account balance.

So basically i have the following:

if (equityStart < AccountBalance())
{
equityStart = AccountBalance();
}

equityStart is an initial balance i have (so its the initial 'high' of my account balance. If my account balance heads south from there then it will start the progression. If some of my following trades (im not martingaling) are successful and my account balance is higher than equityStart, then i wanted equityStart to equal the account balance then i go back to the initial lot size in the progression and stay there until my account balance decreases again. Basically only using my progression method when im in a hole.

The only thing is its not working and im not sure what code i really need to implement to have it keep track of everything.

Is there some formal way of coding the above?

cheers

Wait, so you want to increase your risk if your account goes below the account high watermark? That's a sure way to blow cash when your strategy isn't working well and leave it on the table when the strategy is in tune with the market. Just saying.

Initial thought on your code:
Your code will only work during that one instance of the EA. If you restart it, you reset the high watermark to whatever the balance is at that time in the new instance.

No, im not continually increasing lot sizes. Maybe progressive was an incorrect word to describe it.
I want to be able base following trades on different lot sizes in a progressive manner (progressive as in from trade 2 onwards).

The progressive trades are not always increasing in size, infact they are varying.

Thanks for the reply, i see what your saying regarding the restart. How would you recommend getting around this issue?

Still don't feel a past trade outcome should affect a future trade size (outside of risk scaling with the account balance in a linear fashion.) I mean, the outcome of a past trade has zero impact on the possible outcome of a future trade, so mixing up variance here can't, in theory, improve your returns over a large enough sample of trades.

But anyway..

Perhaps store the value as a global variable instead of a variable only used by the EA? That would solve the issue with the EA re-initializing and losing past high watermarks. Heck, you should be able to even quit and restart MT4 and still retain the variable. The only problem now is, porting the EA to a new install of MT4 would start a new variable.

Other ways would be writing the value to a log file during deinit() and reading that file each time the EA starts again. That would make the value portable with the EA if you move it (plus the file) to the new MT4 instance.

(If a more seasoned programmer knows a better way, please speak up.)