MT4 Trade Manager EA

Babypips MT4 Trade Manager.ex4 (813.8 KB)

Hey guys, I’ve created a MT4 Trade Manager EA because I got too pissed off using MT4 to manually manage my trades. I’ve lost too much picking the wrong lot sizes, missing trades in fast markets and calculating wrong risk % for my trades.

For a program used by so many, MT4 honestly has one of the shittiest trade management system - I mean, you can’t modify a lot size, you need to delete the order and open it again??

Anyway, I’ve spent a long time creating this trade manager EA and am letting everyone use it on 3 of the most popular traded pairs: EURUSD, GBPUSD, USDJPY

I’ll be making babypips as the official support forum of this EA because my website has crap structure and wouldn’t be able to handle the responses and feedback.

I always want to further improve this EA so it’s the best out there. So please send in your suggestions and I’ll do my best to accomodate to them.

Anyway, here’s some information on how to use the trade manager:

Intelligent Lot Size Calculator

You can kiss those horrible online trading calculators goodbye as the trade manager dynamically calculates your lot size based on either your risk % or the fixed amount you’d like to commit to each trade. Once you have determined your stop loss distance, it automatically reverse calculates your lot size.

Intelligent Trading Bars

Use your mouse to move up and down the vertical trading bars to pick your ideal levels for entry, stop loss, take profit, breakeven, partial profits and trailing stop.

Advanced Trade Management

Easily select your breakeven, idea invalidation (explained below), partial profit and trailing stop levels (Simple, Steps, ATR, Chandelier, Parabolic SAR).

Disable and Enable Trade Bars

Easily disable and enable bars which you need for your trade management. Sometimes we don’t need a trailing stop or a breakeven target – so just click the “X” at the top to disable it!

Stealth & Decoy Stop Loss

Hide your stop loss and profit target from your broker if you feel that they might be manipulating your trades. (Requires MT4 to be left on)

Decoy Stop Loss adds X pips to your stop loss and profit target as a decoy to the broker.

Advanced Trailing Stop Loss Methods

You can choose from a range of trailing stop loss methods including Simple, Steps, ATR, Chandelier and ATR.

Smart News Feature

You can now choose to remove opened/pending orders within X minutes of high/medium/low impact news events. At the same time, you can also easily view when the important news events are approaching (adjustable high/medium/low/none).


Let me explain some of the features here:

  • Explanation : You can see that there are a total of 7 grey bars. Each grey bar stands for a different setting. From left to right, they stand for : entry, stop loss, take profit, breakeven, partial profits, trailing stop loss. You would click on a bar to active it. Clicking on the extreme left bar would active your ‘entry’ price selection. You then need to move the mouse up and down to select where you would want your entry to be. If you want to have a market order (instant execution at current market price), then you do not need to click the first bar on the left and can straight away move to picking your stop loss, take profit, other levels.

  • Risk : Risk setting allows you to define how much risk you want to allocate onto this trade. Adjusting one value would automatically update all the other values. Example, if your account is $100,000 and you adjust the value under “% of equity” to be 1%, then the fixed lot value and money value will be adjusted automatically. This is done by how the trade manager EA automatically detects your stop loss and as you continuously adjust the stop loss, the trade manager EA will continuously adjust and update your lot size.

  • Trade : This is basically what your current trade details are. The only thing you should need to pay attention to is the last part that says TP1 which has a field that is 50. This means that 50% of your position would be closed when your partial profit is reached. You can adjust this accordingly to however much you would prefer. If you want to turn if off, you can set it to 0 or simply ‘hover’ over the ‘partial profit’ grey bar and a “X” will appear right at the top of the bar which you can click on to disable the particular bar.

  • Advanced : These are advanced settings that allows you to customise your trade even further.

  • Stealth SL/TP hides your stop loss and take profit from the broker. But to use this, please ensure your EA is always running and do not close your MT4. The reason for this is if you close your MT4, the EA is unable to active your stop loss/take profit when price reaches it.

  • Decoy SL/TP adds a small decoy in terms of pips to your stop loss and take profit. Example if you have a buy entry and your stop loss is at 1.0005. If you add a decoy of 5 pips, then your stop loss is artificially set at 1.0000 but the trade manager EA remembers that your stop loss is really at 1.0005. Again, please ensure your MT4 remains open if you wish to use this feature.

  • Max spread allows you to determine what is the maximum spread you would allow for all your pending trades to be activated. If the spread is too wide, it will wait until spread goes down before activating the trade.

  • News (pending) means how many minutes before/after news events you want to turn off all pending orders.

  • News (active) means how many minutes before news events you would want to close all your opened active otders.

  • Trailing allows you to set the different trailing stop losses. In the left example, you can see “Simple” trailing stop is activated. You can simply click on the word “Simple” and it will auto rotate between the different ones you can select.

Before you begin, it is always important to 1. set your levels and 2. “define your trade”. This step is to help you determine how much you would like to risk on a certain trade. You can choose to risk (only pick one) :

  1. X dollars
  2. Fixed number of lots
  3. Risk % of your account

The easiest way to do this: set your entry, stop loss, take profit, breakeven, etc. Once you are done, go to “define your trade” and key in your risk. That’s all that is needed. Do remember that if you adjust your stop loss after that, you should need to key in and update your risk % again.

Here’s a picture explaining how the bars operate.


How Do I install this?

  1. The Ultimate Trade Manager.ex4 should be placed in your “expert advisor” folder. To do this, open MT4 > File > Open Data Folder

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  1. With the new folder opened, you have to navigate to MQL4 > Experts > paste the Ultimate Trade Manager.ex4 into here.

  1. The next thing you have to do is to enable your MT4 to allow expert advisors. On the top of your MT4, there is a button called “AutoTrading”. Ensure that it is green and not red by clicking on it.

  2. After that, you would need to go to tools > options > Expert Advisors and ensure that the 2 boxes shown in the picture are “checked”

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  1. Once you’re done with all that, you have to enable “chart shift” so that the Ultimate Trade Manager has space to operate.
    To do that, press F8 > Common > ensure “chart shift” is checked as seen in the picture below.

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  1. Once you enable “chart shift”, this nudges your chart to the left giving you some space on the right for the trade manager to be at.
    You can adjust how much space you want on the right by sliding the little arrow left/right as seen in the picture below.

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Risk management practices:

What is Idea Invalidation?

The concept of idea invalidation was actually created by me through my years of trading experience.

When you get into a trade, you think that it will work a certain way. But when it doesn’t work out, it means you should get out as soon as possible.

Here are some examples below on how idea invalidation would work (sorry about the watermark):

Example 1:


Example 2:



I hope everyone likes using this MT4 trade manager. I am allowing it to be used for free for these 3 most popular pairs, if you want to support me, you can PM me. Right now, my main goal is to get as much feedback from you guys on how we can further improve it as a team.

Cheers guys,
Desmond Leong
Pissed-off-user-of-MT4

Babypips MT4 Trade Manager.ex4 (813.8 KB)

7 Likes

Hey guys,

Some of you guys have been asking for the new version after it got expired. Here’s the new version attached

Babypips MT4 Trade Manager.ex4 (814.5 KB)

Hope you guys like it!

Cheers,
Desmond

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Is there any MT5 version available, please?

Very nice bro keep it up

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Hi,

This is a great Trade Manager!

I have a few questions I am hoping you can help me with, that I couldn’t find in the help posts above (I hope I didn’t miss anything above):

  1. what is the setting for the 2nd SL box (default 1.00 - as shown in red circle in uploaded image)
  2. what is the setting for the 2nd BE box (default 15.00 - as shown in red circle in uploaded image)
  3. How to set TP2 and TP3? For example: in the image posted, TP1 is at 20 pips, in which 50% of the position will be taken off. So there is 50% of the position left, how does the rest get taken off?
  4. Is there a place I can purchase the full version of this EA so that it works on all currency pairs?

Thank you in advance for your help!!

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Hey sorry bud, at the moment no MT5 version yet :slight_smile:

Thanks! Glad you like it!

Yo dude! Glad you like it :slight_smile:

  1. That is the risk to reward value. That means if your SL is 35 pips and your TP is 70 pips, then it is 2.0.

  2. Oh that part is actually the idea invalidation value (purple line). Since idea invalidation is the opposite of breakeven (moving TP to entry vs SL to entry), we placed it there beside vs creating another line. Sorry for the confusion but good point.

  3. TP1 (light green line) is for the first partial profit. TP (dark green line) will close the remaining position. We haven’t created additional TP levels yet like TP2,3,4. How many do you think you’ll need? Was thinking creating TP1,2,3 would be enough.

  4. Cool man you can just get it here

Thank you very much for the reply. It was very helpful!

I have a couple more questions:

  1. So TP1 is actually TP1, but TP is actually TP2, right?
  2. With this trade manager, does it manage every single position you take separately, even if it’s on the same currency pair? I mean, if I set the parameters for a trade, it will remember the parameters for that trade. And if later on, I take another position with different TP and BE it will remember those for the second position I take? If so, do I need to open up a new chart to take a new position or can I do it on the same chart? Sometimes I will have a swing trade on a currency pair, then I will do multiple day trades and scalps, taking separate positions.

Recommendations for this great Trade Manager:

  1. In answer to your question, I think to cover all types of trading systems, having up to TP4 will cover almost all types of traders. I use 4 TP’s during swing trading, mostly exiting at major levels.
  2. Ability to save favorite setups. For example: Hitting CTRL-1 will automatically execute the trade (as a buy stop, sell limit, market price, etc.) with Setup #1: position size, TP levels, BE level, etc., CTRL-2 will automatically execute the trade (as a buy stop, sell limit, market price, etc.) with Setup #2: position size, TP levels, BE level, etc., etc. Having like 3 or 4 of the user’s favorite setups.
  3. Ability for BE to continue to move according to your TP levels. For example: After hitting TP1, it moves BE to Entry (or a few pips after entry). After hitting TP2, BE / SL line will move to where TP1 was, after hitting TP3, BE/SL will move up to previous TP2 line. etc… This helps you scale out of the trade and ensure you continue to lock in profits.
  4. For BE, is user able to set how many pips away from the Entry point?For example, can user set ‘2 pips’ after Entry? That will help cover spread, swap, and other fees, so that it is truly break even as opposed to taking a loss on the trade. (If the trade manager already does this, please ignore this recommendation. I couldn’t figure out how to set it.)

I hope these suggestions help!

I will test the trade manager more to make sure I understand how to use it properly and if all goes well, purchase the full version copy very soon (in the next few days). I do hope that the new suggestions can be implemented though! hehe Keep up the great work!!

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Willing to try it out…

Does your ea allows to have multiple tp or partially closed positions?

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Hey dude,

Yes, so in the current version, it has partial TP and full TP. Like TP1 and TP2. You can set how much of each position you wish to close for each TP.

After considering much feedback, I have modified the EA to have TP1, TP2 and TP3 to accommodate the different take profit levels for everyone.

Dude thanks for the long feedback man, really appreciate it.

Yes TP1 is TP1 and TP is TP2. I have modified a new version to have TP1, TP2 and TP3 (with TP3 being the final one).

You can take multiple positions on the same chart, it will remember the settings for each trade as long as you use it to open the trade.

Regarding your recommendations:

  1. Good idea. I will add to TP3 first and maybe soon TP4 (it’s getting really wide haha).

  2. favourite setups is actually a really interesting idea. I might not be able to link it to CTRL-1 or CTRL-2, but i could have a GUI bar at the top/bottom/side where you could preconfigure your preferred settings. Thanks for this feedback.

  3. Good idea lol. That’s almost like a trailing stop approach right?

  4. Good idea once again - I have added it into the latest trade manager version as an offset based on pips.

Really glad you like the trade manager. I’ll continue to improve it as per the suggestions of everyone here (with some discretion of course haha).

I wasnt able to load to the terminal , could I send you pM?

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It is similar and indeed looks like almost the same feature. However, it is completely different. A lot of people don’t understand why.

I’ll try to explain clearly. Ideally, (for example, if going long) SL is supposed to be placed just below support. Theoretically, only if it breaks support do you exit. Now, with a trailing stop, there will be times when the SL will creep into the trading zone (between support and resistance) and you will get stopped out when you shouldn’t. This is a huge drawback of the trailing stop method, which is why a lot of traders don’t use it. Personally, I think it’s okay to use a trailing stop after hitting TP1, in some cases. However, before hitting TP1, using a trailing stop isn’t recommended at all.

Especially with systems that are similar to the way I trade. I use an extremely tight stop loss when scalping. I’ll have something like a 5 pip SL and a TP of 1:1.5 for TP1 and 1:3 for TP2, etc. I set a TP1 at 1.5, not because it’s my primary TP, but because the odds of hitting TP1 is extremely high and it allows me to lock in a little profit and immediately move my SL to BE so I’m completely risk free for the rest of the trade.

This only works if it’s not a trailing stop because it’s very easy for it to move 5 pips up then 5 or 6 pips back down. This is normal. But if I use a trailing stop, I’ll get stopped out at (near) break even a lot of times on what would have been winning trades. However, if SL jumps to BE after my TP1, I’ll have plenty of space for price to move to reach my TP2, TP3, etc. And I’m risk free.

Currently, without a trade manager, what I do now, is once I hit TP1, I’ll manually move my SL to a little past my entry (to cover spread, swap, fees, etc.) and life is good. It’s a little tedious having to do that over and over again, but the main problem is when I’m swing trading over night and I haven’t hit TP1 yet before bed. What can happen is I’ll hit my TP1, then price moves in the wrong direction and I get stopped out because I couldn’t manually move my SL to BE after my first take profit, which would have ensured that the trade was risk free. Instead, I end up with a losing trade overall. For example, if I had 3 TP’s, then I only took profit on 33% of my trade at 1.5, which means I lose 1/2 of trade.

I hope my explanation was clear. If anyone doesn’t understand, I can try to explain it another way.

In any case, I don’t know if you were planning to add this feature or not, but if you could kindly consider adding this feature of automatically moving SL only after hitting TP1, TP2, etc. (where SL moves to BE after TP1, then SL can move to TP1 when TP2 is hit, and an option to turn it into a trailing stop when aiming for TP3, etc. that would be SO, SO helpful. (It will also help me sleep better at night since I’ll know that my SL will be moved to BE). lol

Thanks for all that you do man, great trade manager!!

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Hey buddy sorry for the delayed reply. I will upload a new version tomorrow which is new and improved :slight_smile:

Thanks a bunch for the explanation dude. Yeah I agree and I know what you mean. I trade in a similar manner too and basically move my stop losses in “trenches” vs “trailing”.

I’ll think of a way to implement this… if you have some ideas on the “UX” user experience and UI (user interface) part of it, please share your ideas with me. I’ve created TP1 TP2 and TP3 already. I have Breakeven which is straightforward. I have SL which is straightforward too. Unless. I have SL1 SL2 and SL3 to be tied to TP1, TP2 and TP3…? That will make the trade manager really wide though. I might use 2 separate files for that, a basic and advanced version.

And glad that you like the trade manager! It’s really tough to have built it and I build a lot of the features from my own trading lol. MT4 really sucks in trade management which is why I thought this would be more straightforward.

Great news!!! looking forward to it.

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Here’s the latest trade manager with TP1 TP2 TP3 and breakeven offset.

TP1 (lightest green) is the first TP which is currently programmed to close 50% of your position, you can adjust this.

TP2 is the second TP which will close 50% (adjustable) of remaining position.

TP3 closes the entire remaining position :slight_smile:

Babypips MT4 Trade Manager V2.ex4 (860.2 KB)

Can only be used with EURUSD, GBPUSD, USDJPY?

Is there a full paid version?

Yup there is! MT4 Trade Manager EA Free Download - MetaTrader 4

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