Disliked...
I do a lot of trades daily and most of them close at profit.
However, I was watching 1 AUDUSD trade last night which was at profit and I had a 3 pip trailing stop on it
but I later saw it closed at -1 which is very suspicious..... I didn't have a stop loss and the trailing stop kicked in after 3 pips of profit
so that trade should have closed as +3 minus any spread & commision so lets say = +1.5.
...Ignored
Say you set your trailing stop to 30 points (3 pips.) The price will need to move to 30 points above break even first, before the trailing stop is set 30 points below the current price (in this case, that would be your entry price.)
If the market then tanks right back down to where you entered (very possible with AUD/USD, it shakes within 3-4 pips easily,) then this would quickly knock you out. If you got a negative closing price (you said -1 pip) it could have been related to slippage if the market ticked down hard.
That said, you can always double check what happened in your history log. There the last stop level (from a trailing stop) will be kept on the order. This is the trigger price. Then you can see the order closing price listed as well for comparison.
In the trade you gave as an example, you'd have to had +6pip in profit first before you could expect the trailing stop within MetaTrader to take you out at ~+3 with a 3 pip trailer.
Lastly, you will experience slightly more slippage using trailing stops than hard stop loss orders. That's a limitation of MT4, as trailing stops must be tracked on your client/computer, and only after they've been triggered will your computer send an order out to the trade server. (Hard stops, in contrast, stay on the trade server and have a much quicker execution time because of that.)
Honestly, I wish MetaTrader would implement better trailing stops... ones that are server-side.. ones that can start trailing while the trade isn't in profit or before the stop level had been reached in profit in the first place (reducing risk aggressively is a huge part of some of my strategies.) But these are the tools that have become "standard" with FX retail trading.. so gotta work with them or work around them.
Hope that helps
FXGears.com
