Mt4 trailing stop questions

Beginner Questions
1

i am using the alpari mt4 and as you guys know they use pippetts .5 decimals…

so i have a few questions

1.when setting a trailing stop if i want an inital trailing stop of 25 pips ,should i enter 250 or simply 25 ? because in the custom window the values are to be entered in Pips [but i seriously doubt it ] because the default values like 40 ,140 are given as points !!!

  1. Is it possible to see my trailing stop as a line in the chart ?? like the Stoploss line or take profit line ???
2

Hi rijo,

1)With the 5 decimals you’d enter 250 for 25 pip trailing stop.

  1. When your trailing stop kicks in, then it will show the stoploss line. It will only kick in when it gets into profit as set by the trailing stop but until then, it has no profit to trail meaning you have no stoploss. So you still have to set one when you place the order (or modify the order to set one).
    :slight_smile:
3

Hi itsrijo,

I use MT4 with my New Zealand broker (LatitudeFX) with 5 decimal places. I know for myself to set a 25 pip stop loss I have to select a 250 pip trailing stop. I would assume it is the same for you.
I learnt the hard way, setting a 50 pip trailing stop (should have set it at 500 pips) and almost immediately getting stopped out (at a profit at least) when it backed up 5 regular pips on me.
Keep in mind also that you’ll have to keep MT4 running for the trailing stop to update the stop as moving the stop is done by your computer not the broker.

Hope that helps :slight_smile:

4

so the trailing stop line will only appear once the price moves past the trailing stop mark that i’ve set … right sweet pip ?

its just that it would be nice if mt4 actually drew a trailing stop line once i’ve set it cuz like "one pip at a time " here i’ve made a few noob mistakes because of the 5th decimal …

hmm… i guess thats the reason my stops were not honoured … thanks [:D]

thankyou guys …

5

kind of…if you set your trailing stop to 25 pips, then when you are 25 pips in profit, the trailing stop will be 25 pips behind, meaning it will initially set at breakeven, then trail from there. If price doesn’t reach at least 25 pips profit…say maybe only gets to 24 pips profit and then reverses… you still don’t have a stop loss set in case your computer loses it’s connection and price really reverses in a big way before you can log back in!

6

so thats how it is… thanks sweetpip … and i didn’t know that the mt4 client had to be running for trailing stop to work …

7

Fortunately you can set a normal stop as well. So lets say you set a 25 pip stop to start with and set the trailing stop to 25 (250 pips on the 5 decimal system) then MT4 will move your original stop up to breakeven when it hits 25 pips profit.
:slight_smile:

8

Yes…I think I said that…:wink: