Primers are an addition to the regular trades, not a replacement. You set your regular buy/sell every 50 pips regardless. If however your channel is getting lopsided, you can use primers to help balance it (or just make money faster assuming you read the trends correctly, but that’s always through regardless of system ;-).
So, an additional trade every 30 pips, with TP at 100 will increase you regular profit from 9.2$ (2 trades of TP 50 using 0.01x25) to 18.2$ and another +9.2$ in open trades, or simply put, you triple the profits for every 100 pips movement in the same direction. If direction shifts and your SLs are wrong, you will of course triple your losses instead - hence the trailing SL strategy.
Using 1.5850 and a sharp drop as an example you would open these trades:
Buy 1.5854 Normal
Sell 1.5850 Normal
Sell 1.5850 P1
Sell 1.5820 P2
Buy 1.5804 Normal
Sell 1.5800 Normal
Sell 1.5790 P3
Sell 1.5760 P4
Buy 1.5754 Normal
Sell 1.5750 Normal
Sell 1.5730 P5
Greenlanding works great if the cable moves up and down in a few hundred pips range, but if it suddenly changes to a completely different level, it will take some time before the profits from regular variations in the rate at the new level will cover the cost of all the trades you placed against the movement while getting there. A continous rate change (not likely to happen without any retracements as this is FX not stocks, but still, we’re talking math here…) of 1.000 pips will need an investment of 1.335$ at x25 and 0.01 lots. In the same movement you will only earn 92$, leaving a drawdown on your balance of 1.243$ (not a loss, but a balance drawdown). Once the cable settles at the new level you will start to earn back that money 4.6$ at a time. That is unless you run into a margin call in the mean time and the broker starts closing your trades, or you don’t have the money to open new trades at the new level. The 0.006% drawdown per pip is your warning that you are facing this situation and you either have to add more money to your account to finance the expansion of your channel’s range, or use primers to make money faster.
As to your second question, primers are dangerous, no doubt about it, especially initially while not having a SL. I would probably include a SL of 25 or so on OrderSend. I think the “auto” mentioned in the dox are just a result of the limited abilities of eToro’s WebTrader. Michael is so good at this that he places large primers frequently, but even he runs into losses, and unless he’s hospitalized like last week, his losses are “always” misplaced primers.
If you have sufficient funds in your balance to cover the whole range of movements the cable takes, great, no need for primers. However, the actual funds needed to secure a channel (swap not included) are:
1.000 pips: 1.243$
2.000 pips: 4.301$ (the 2.000$ suggested is based on probabilities for profits before large level changes I guess)
3.000 pips: 9.359$
4.000 pips: 16.417$
5.000 pips: 25.475$
6.000 pips: 36.533$
And this is also why you shouldn’t use primers frequently, only when neccesary. In theory, you can change the variables and open new regular trades at any level, let’s say 25 pips instead of every 50 (I think muji3009 does this). Now, to cover a 2.000 pips wide channel you’ll need 16.601$. By doubling the amount of trades, the buffer needed quadruples, and so must your primers if the rate level changes rapidly.
According to the stats at Google finance, GBP/USD had a top of 2.0220 (March 14th 2008) and a bottom of 1.3764 (January 23rd 2009) meaning a total drop of 6.456 pips in less than a year. If this had happened in a single continous movement (which of course it didn’t) you would have needed 42.812$ (plus swap costs) at 50 pips level to cover the whole channel. I’ve run my EA through strategy tester (I have no primers logic included) from 1971 and it came through just fine, but with a start at January 1st 2008 is fails completely. Will GBP/USD move like this in the near future? Not likely. Would I stake my retirement on the range staying within 2000 pips for the next two years? Hell no!
Personally I am looking to stay at micro-lots for much longer than the Greenlander strategy suggests in order to build up cash for a significantly wider channel than 2.000 pips, but that’s my low risk attitude. Others will differ. Well placed primers can build up your buffer faster, and will lessen the impact of large movements significantly, but they also add risk as you insert discretionary trading into the system.
I would therefor split the EA into two “parts”, the regular trades that always trigger, and an additional set of functions, maybe a script, that can set primers. I’m not good enough at technicals yet to provide any meaningful directions on what kind of indicators should be allowed to trigger primers. I would like to have the function included in the EA (maybe it can be turned on or off in an external variable), but as long as I have the possibility, I would just ask Michael before turning it on. A warning that it’s time to consider primers would be great in any case. And I couldn’t place the orders/SL fast enough without a script either.
The dox suggest only setting orders against the movement when you get to the edges of yor channel (no sells at the bottom, no buys on top). This makes sense for a strict 2.000 pips channel, but leaves you vulnerable to channel collapse if the rate settles above/below your channel. Placing primers at channel extremes would exacerbate this, so I wouldn’t reccommend it, but then again my paranoia always wants a larger channel fully funded. I’m still working on a formula to calculate how large a channel can be before the swap eats up the profits so I guess I’m in a “worst case scenario” mode these days 
As for the “Hour-glass” table, the Account cells throws me off. My understanding from the rest of the table is that you place an order (in his example 800$) at 1.5850, then another at 1.5820 etc. but how 800$+800$ can be 1.000$ is beyond me, so to come to grips with primers, I decided to ignore the Account cells. Otherwise it makes no sense to me at all. Also, there is absolutely no way I would be willing to increase lot size on the magnitude suggested as the movement progresses. To me this setup is good salesmanship, but crappy math that will leave teethmarks in your seating area more often than not.
Re
Dennis
