What I meant is that while placing the trade manually you can't enter a magic number. Through an EA I can put magic numbers on open trades/pending trades all day long. My point was that you would still need a way to distinguish which trades should actually be hijacked by the EA. You may not want it to grab all but only certain ones. One way would be to enter a unique comment and then have the EA look for that as it loops through the trades but I feel that can have it's own problems.
I'm not saying it would happen but if someone forgot to add the comment, mistyped the comment, etc. then they could end up in trouble because the EA might not find the right match. I have used comments as a way to monitor/manage trades and in fact I do that with this EA. Second order's comment is the TP of the first. This way if the EA is interrupted or the first order stops out, etc. I can still get the information needed to know when to update to break even. But in my EA I know exactly what to expect in the comment and it also has the symbol and magic number confirming I have the right trade. The EA will not mistype my comment.
I know it seems like I'm going on but I feel it's important for us all to understand at least a bit. This is also not meant to discourage or say something can't be done. If I can enlighten some on the mysteries behind an EA than they may also be able to translate to me what they want and how they think it may work.
I always read more into what people may ask of me because I'm used to digging for what they really want. If someone asks me for a donut then I can guess that they'll also want coffee (2 creams / 1 sugar), a plate, spoon, napkin, etc. At this point I need you (whoever) to be as specific as possible. Seeing the whole picture initially reduce fixes, work arounds, kinks, etc.
By using the script that I am refering to one may place an order manually and assign a magic number to the order. Then the trader could assign any EA which has magic number capabilities to manage the trade. This would be best done only if the EA could be set to 'manage only' so it wouldn't buy or sell additional orders.
Whether or not you wish to modify your EA to have a 'manage only' mode is totally up to you of course, I just thought I would share the fact that it is possible to manually enter a trade and assign a magic number.
I have tested this script and it seems to work. I entered a buy, lot size, and magic number. I then attached an EA with the same magic number set to manage trades only. There are two other open trades on the account but the EA is only seeing the one that the magic number was assigned to using the script.
To use this script place it in your experts/scripts folder. To manually open a trade with a magic number just double click on the script then choose buy or sell, lot size, and assign a magic number.
Happy trading. . .
