I’m 3 weeks into my live trading and I made a boo boo yesterday. Before this mistake that was made, I was up 3% of account since I started. I normally make trades 1% s/l and t/p. I’ve made about 15 trades since I’ve started and normally use H1 and H4 charts. I also seem to be having a habit of not letting my trade go fully to t/p or to s/l because I will usually see a reason to exit or take some off the table. I’m only explaining this because that is why I’m only up 3% after so many trades. It’s been about 90% winning 10% losing trades but again, not the full 1% on most.
So I wanted to try something different. Commodities. I open up a XAU/USD 4H chart and I saw an opportunity to go long. I do what I always do. Determine my stop loss distance in pips, open up my excel page, and figure out my units I need. Something I’ve noticed on MT4 software which I despise is on normal currencies, determining the pip distance by using the crosshair is 1/10 off. For example, on the E/U chart, a distance of 1354 is really 135.4 pips. This is always the number used when I enter it into my excel sheet.
Well, I pull up the X/U 4H chart and price is around 17.678. Put s/l around 17.36 and t/p around 17.928. I see the distance that MT4 shows is about “2800” so I enter 280 for pip range and end up trading 10x more than I had originally wanted. The spread puts me -0.8% of current balance. I end up exiting out to avoid a major blow. Damn Damn Damn. What a stupid mistake. Oanda actually shows you the t/p and s/l in USD and I didn’t pay attention because I had been so used to entering the trades. A beginners mistake I guess. The spread alone was 200 pips. Didn’t make the connection until afterwards.
I did end up making some of it back after making the adjustment and reentering my position.
Why does MT4 show their pips as numbers like that? Can’t they just show the real pip values?
Im not talking about pipettes. Im saying that in determining the amount of pips from 2 points on mt4, one cant just use the value given because it would be wrong. Im pretty sure a few months back they didnt have this problem, but for some reason they updated to this nonsense.
MT4 was never designed to work with pipettes, the brokers are actually tricking the software into using them, and that’s why the crosshair distances are off 10x. The MT4 software itself “thinks” that pipettes are pips…
You’re not the only one to screw up a trade because of that. I’ve done it too, so don’t feel bad.
The main confusion I had initially is that apparently comodities have a 0x pip adjustment whereas currencies have 10x on the same damn software. I had been demoing for months and never had this problem because I was used to it. It was my first comodities trade however so I did what I always do and assumed everything was the same.
one time meant to open a 0.01 lots position, I use that minimum lot size when I’m not too sure about the position but I still want to take the trade like when news is due, anyway I accidentally hit the 9 instead of the zero and opened a 0.91 lots position, 90 times bigger than I intended so of course it went all wrong on a price spike and cost me 90 times more than I had intended to risk
That reminds me of the scroll wheel issue. When you have an open trade window and bump the scroll wheel it changes the pair. So, I was intently watching the chart waiting for my entry and didn’t realize that I had bumped the wheel and then entered a trade in a totally random pair. Then I actually considered staying in the trade before slapping myself and getting out quickly.
