Trade Management EA

I've just recently finished the first version of trade management EA written in MQL4. This EA does nothing in the way of initiating trades, but only monitors trades for the symbol of the chart it is applied to. This monitoring includes keeping track of stop levels and profit targets for open trades. Whenever a profit target is reached that you deem an appropriate time to move your stop-loss, the program recalculates the stop level according to a trading plan you've put in place (through the use of variables) and begins monitoring the trade again with the new information in place. Currently, the program does not actually "set" a stop-loss as I've found that in some situations I would often like to set SLs so small that my MT4 does not want to accept them. Instead, the program acts as though you were employing a mental stop-loss: calculating the stop-loss level according to your plan, checking the price at each tick and comparing it to the stop-level and exiting when it is hit. However, in the case where trades are going well, and your profit levels are being hit, the program automatically moves your SL according to your rules and then begins targeting a new profit level that you set.

This EA allows you to customize your own profit levels for your trades and the percentages of the profits you would like to take for each level. If you're a breakeven trader when you hit your target, no problem, set your stopRatios to 0 and let all your trades run with a stop at break even. Do you prefer to change your targets as your trade becomes more and more profitable? For instance, when your trade is up 30 pips you move your stop to BE but when you're up 150 pips you prefer to keep at least 100 of them should it begin to turn back? No problem, just build it into your trade plan where at 150 pips, your stop loss is moved up to take 66.7% of your earned profit (100 pips). Another feature is the ability to initiate trades and have the EA ignore them, in case you'd like full manual control of a particular trade. When you place suh an order, simply put in the comment field DNM for "Do Not Monitor" and the program will happily skip over the order and monitor only those trades you allow it to.

Currently, this EA has not been thoroughly tested in every possible situation I have designed it to work in so I'm currently looking for other interested traders to perhaps test it in a demo set up and report any bugs or misgivings they find to me so that I might fix them and make this EA work perfectly. Currently, the EA can manage up to 100 trades at a time, (I picked this number simply because it's round and seems to be a reasonable cap to how many trades any trader might ACTUALLY have open at any time). Finally, the EA only monitors running buy/sell orders, and does not interfere in any way with pending limit/stop orders. The program also does not edit any stop-loss levels in the orders you have open. If you have a stop-loss set on a particular order whichever is hit first (the program's according to your plan, or the manual one) will be the stop that exits the trade. Unfortunately, running manual stops with this platform would more than likely not behave well as part of the program relies on the exit to be carried out by the program itself. My recommendation would be to add a DNM comment to any order which you believe requires a manual stop instead of simply allowing your trade plan to set it.

If anyone is interested in this EA, please feel free to post in this thread or PM me and I'll be more than happy to supply the code to you for use. As I said, at the moment, this EA is still in testing stages so I'm looking for some people that might be willing to test it on a demo platform. I would not want anyone to use this tool live before I'm absolutely sure of its performance in as many situations as possible.

Attached to this post is the first version of this EA. Please use on a demo account first, to ensure that the advisor functions as you would like before employing it on your live account. Please report any bugs to me in this thread or request other useful features if you like it and would like to see it expanded upon.

As for using it, the program currently allows for up to 7 different profit targets, not necessarily distinct as well as 7 different profit ratios for each target.

The profit targets are set in pip amounts, so if your first target is to hit 20 pips positive, set profitTarget1 to 20 and then set all the others to the targets you desire. Note: it is irrelevant which type of order you're using on the symbol so only use POSITIVE values in these spots.

For the stopRatio variables, these are to set the percentage of profit you want to keep from each target. So if you hit target 1 and want a breakeven trade, set stopRatio1 to 0 and you will have a stop out at BE. If you have a target4 of 200 pips and would like to ensure that you keep 150 of them should price turn, set stopRatio4 to .75 and so on. Initially, the program will only stop a newly opened trade aiming for profitTarget1 if you set setInitialStop to a value of 1 and employ a RewardRisk value.

Setting this is fairly easy, if you have an initial target of say 40 pips but you want a tight stop of 10 pips, then simply set setInitialStop to 1 and RewardRisk to 4.0. This takes your initial profit target, divides it by 4 and stops your trade out as soon as your 10 pip stop is breached.

After setting these variables to your desired values, you can begin running the EA and it will monitor the trades on that symbol according to your plan.

If you ever want to initiate a trade with the program running but you do not want to stop it or have it monitor the new trade, simply make sure to add the letters "DNM" (without quotations) in the comment field. PLEASE BE SURE TO DO THIS AS YOU OPEN THE ORDER AND NOT AFTERWARDS. If the program has logged a trade into its monitoring array and you add a DNM on a post-hoc basis, the program will still monitor your trade according to the plan you put in place. If you do not want this to happen ADD DNM AS A COMMENT UPON OPENING THE ORDER.

Enjoy! And if you have comments, suggestions, problems or anything else to say about it, please post here or PM me.

DISCLAIMER: PLEASE REMEMBER THIS IS STILL IN TESTING AND I HAVE VERIFIED IT TO WORK ON SEVERAL DEMO TRADES BUT IT I MAKE NO GUARANTEE AS TO ITS EFFECTIVENESS IN EXTENUATING CIRCUMSTANCES. AS SUCH, I'M NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR ANY LOSS YOU MAY INCUR ON A LIVE ACCOUNT AS A RESULT OF USING THIS ADVISOR. I'M WORKING TO FIX ANY BUGS THAT MIGHT OCCUR BUT PLEASE BE CAREFUL AND RESPONSIBLE WITH THIS IF YOU ARE NOT COMFORTABLE USING IT ON LIVE AT THE MOMENT.

Also, remember, this program does not SET stop-loss levels. It functions essentially like a mental stop-loss. This is good and bad as it's still susceptible to huge spikes in price where your spreads shoot up but if you're paranoid about your broker hunting your stops, this helps give you an automatic stop without setting one in the trade ticket. Don't be alarmed if you open trades and see no stop-levels appearing on your chart, that is by design. It also helps you avoid the platform rejecting your SL levels because they are too close to the market price.

Another note, if you have a set of orders which are currently being monitored, but you wish to close them manually for whatever reason, you must first stop the EA or the platform will tell you that the trade is busy.

hello factorof2
I'm gonna try it out. I've been looking for a trade management robot. I do have some ideas if you would like to here.
How is your trading going?
Henn9

This week it's been going pretty well. I was having some trouble getting started trading, mostly because I would do my analysis and not pull the trigger. So I've since gone back to demo trading. My goal is to maintain some good profitability over the next few months while I work on learning more and getting some actual investment capital together. If I can maintain some good profitability levels over this time period I'll feel a lot more comfortable with my own trading abilities and will be hopefully be in a much better frame of mind to trade well. This week, I only really traded a little bit (a couple hours) but I managed to close my week out at around +140 pips. If I remember correctly, I had two trades out of seven that went negative, and fortunately my negative trades were marginal losses compared to my winning trades which really built my confidence in my entries.

And by all means, if you have any ideas please share them here. I'm very interested in making this EA as full of functionality as possible.