Hi SteveSteveHopwood » Fri Apr 17, 2020 3:00 am wrote:
Scaling out/in has been a failure for me.
Have you looked at how the trades closed out?
I have not used the latest scale out code you are using now but if it is like the original code we used in the SPB, I noticed that there was a problem with it.
I don't know if you are aware but all my CRAPPY ICMarkets accounts blew up.
This prompted me to look into the cause and at the same time I also looked at the scale out function and I found a problem with it.
When a trade closed partially, the remaining open trade would also close because the EA would keep the original SL intact so it will immediately see that the remaining open trade had also reached its scaling point and it will also partially close it and it will immediately do the same for the rest of the open trade.
So the scaling out function was working like a stepped SL and not as intended.
It would then wait for 30 pips or so and close out trade 2 also in the same way and then do the same for trades, 3, 4, 5 etc, (100% of each trade) all of them in a stepped fashion.
My fix was to RESET the SL of the partially closed trade to a new 1000 pip distance and this stopped the death by 1000 cuts. This technique works well because once the EA partially closes trade 1, it will leave it alone for a long while and it will then address trades 2, 3,4,5 etc which are also deep under water.
At that stage it doesn't matter which trade is partially closed because the margin impact is similar but it is probably better to move on to the next trade and to partially close trades 2,3,4 etc.
Another problem I'm addressing now is the trade size.
Some time ago, I introduced automatic calculation of the trade size based on pip value ( I used the SPB risk percent function (1000pip SL and 2% risk)) This gave me a more balanced trade size across all pairs but it didn't address the problem where some currency pairs had large trading ranges.
My fix was to divide the calculated trade size in pairs like the GBPUSD,GBPJPY,GBPCHF by 2
,GBPNZD by 4, EURAUD by 2 and EURJPY by 1.5
Of course if we don't use these pairs we don't need to do this division
and also this technique only works on large size accounts because on small accounts the trade size 0.01 cannot be divided further.
I hope this helps
Have a nice day
:hi: