Grid Template Expert Advisor For MT4
WE IMPROVED THIS EXPERT ADVISOR FOR YOU!!!
PLEASE NOTE: This expert advisor was publicly available for free usage on other websites and is not programmed by us. We explain the functionality and possible improvements of the EA. Furthermore, we are convinced that fully automatic Expert Advisors will fail in the long run. On the other hand, our semi-automatic approach with detecting the best setups and then activating our Expert Advisors (e.g. V-Power EA, EdgeZone EA) produced many successful traders and some of them even got prop traders at prop trading firms. Therefore, we added a similar semi-automatic trading feature (to allow only buy or only sell trades) to the free Expert Advisors. You can download the modified version here and enjoy!
Table Of Contents:
- Grid Template Expert Advisor For MT4
- The Grid Template Expert Advisor For MT4 – Entry Criteria
- The Grid Template Expert Advisor For MT4 – Exit Criteria
- The Grid Template Expert Advisor For MT4 – Room for Improvement
The Grid Template Expert Advisor For MT4 is a grid martingale algorithmic trading system for MT4 platform. It is a complete trading solution as it handles both trade entry and trade exit. Once dropped on the chart, the robot takes control of trade operations, and the user does not have to tweak any parameters in Inputs. The default settings work just fine. The unique feature of this trading system is the use of pending orders with expiration time. As a grid martingale system, the robot does not use any technical indicators to generate buy and sell signals. Trading is mathematically motivated.
Anyone with limited experience in using automated trading systems can immediately put this robot into action on a demo account. Whether the trading account is opened in a four-digit or five-digit broker, the expert advisor will work without any issue. On a fairly short run in the strategy tester, the robot managed to get to breakeven. Win rate is favorable (more than 50 percent), and drawdown is low (less than two percent). The test was run for a period of five months but for one symbol only. During testing, the robot executed a total of 489 trades, which is close to 100 trades per month. The trade statistics look good, but the robot was not profitable, and it is not clear why the result turns out this way. The user might find an answer when he conducts his own investigation.
The Grid Template Expert Advisor For MT4 – Entry Criteria
The Grid Template Expert Advisor for MT4 does not wait for a new candle to form to take action. It runs by the tick and performs only one check prior to opening trades. The robot only checks if automated trading is enabled on the client terminal. If that is the case, it will put pending orders on the chart right away.
As shown in the above image, immediately after putting the expert advisor on any symbol, the robot will place five buy and five sell pending orders, specifically stop orders, on the active symbol. The first pair of buy stop and sell stop orders is placed 15 pips above and below the market price. The subsequent pending orders are placed 10 pips from the previous order. This type of trade entry allows the market to come to predetermined levels before orders become live trades. When the market decides to move in one direction, that will be favorable to this type of orders.
Each trade will have a lot size of 0.01 unless the user adjusts this value in Inputs. Besides, the user has liberty to specify the distance between trade orders and the distance between market price and the first pair of orders. This is advised if the user has done some initial testing, either manually or in back tester, to understand what values are suitable for which pairs.
Along with the pending order trade requests are the orders for stop loss and take profit for each trade. The default stop loss is 30 pips, and the default take profit is 20 pips. This relationship of the stop loss and take profit favors risk over reward. If a trade happens to become a loser, the trader would stand to lose more than if the trade had otherwise turned out to be a winner. Adjusting the risk-reward ratio in favor of reward might lead to an entirely different result, so the user might consider taking this route.
The Grid Template Expert Advisor For MT4 – Exit Criteria
The Grid Template Expert Advisor for MT4 does not actively manage orders once they are placed on the current symbol. It lets the market come to the pending orders to convert them into market trades. Thereafter, the market will decide whether a market order wins or loses. This happens when price touches either the stop loss limit or the take profit target.
The only time that the expert advisor intervenes is when a pending order has been placed for a while but has not become a live trade. If the pending order has been in the trade pool for more than four hours (default), the robot will cancel the order. If several pending orders have been placed at the same time, they will be cancelled at one time.
The Grid Template Expert Advisor For MT4 – Room for Improvement
The Grid Template Expert Advisor for MT4 is suitable to be used in trading strongly trending markets and in times of high-impact news. This is because stop orders are opened and closed in profit when the market moves strongly in one direction. If the market is ranging, it will trigger trades and then move in the opposite direction for a loss.
In view of this, the user must do a search to find out which markets trend most of the time. In recent memory, the markets that tend to trend adamantly strong are NZDUSD, USDCAD, EURAUD, and EURNZD, to name just a few. Other markets also show strong unidirectional price movements in the past, probably triggered by strong fundamental influences. Among these are EURUSD, GBPUSD and the major yen pairs. One way to know if a market shows a trending behavior is by looking at the daily and weekly charts. If higher timeframes like the daily and weekly charts are to be used as reference, then the trader must increase the size of the grid while maintaining the minimal lot size for each trade.
While simplicity is a good thing in other fields of work, that might not be applicable to trading with automated trading systems. Otherwise, bad actors would not have to break a sweat before cracking the code of the trading system. If this happens, the trader using such system would be at a disadvantage. Therefore, the expert advisor with its very simplistic approach to trading must be improved.
One way to improve this trading system is to hide the grid levels by not placing the subsequent stop orders at the get-go. The robot can be set to add one trade at a time if price has moved a certain distance from the previous trade. Additionally, instead of using the same gap between trades, the grid level can be varied for each trade by using steps. If this is not enough, the program developer or editor might consider adding trades at the open of the new candle. This way the distance between trades is surely not the same.
Another route to explore is the application of stop loss adjustment instead of using a fixed stop loss price. While this stratagem puts the whole trading account at risk, it allows the robot to generate recurring small profits that add up over time. To reduce risk to the account, an equity stop can be put in place to trigger closure of all open trades when a certain account drawdown percentage is reached. These are all possible avenues that anyone with programming language can take.
It appears this expert advisor is intended to provide guidance on how to develop a trading system that makes use of the grid concept. To make it a profitable robot, some other functions must be built into the code. As already mentioned, stop loss adjustment, opening trade at a new candle, and varying the grid levels are some of the directions that the trader or coder can go. Once the expert advisor is improved programmatically, only after then can further testing in the strategy tester or demo trading be done in earnest. Back testing with optimization is an arduous but beneficial process one may consider taking to maximize the potential of this trading system.
Partially Automated Trading Besides Your Day Job
Alerts In Real-Time When Divergences Occur
