I have a hedging expert advisor running and it has currently opened many trades in both directions. I wanted to know if I switch off the auto trading button on mt4 to stop it opening more buy trades and hopefully it will recover on the sell side. When I switch the EA back on when it’s back in the sell trades, will it still carry on from the previous open trades and manage them? I am hoping that if the market drops back to the sell trades it may recover. I’m worried as I may lose free margin.
What you say confirms the fear I have had that this is the way some EA’s work - they blindly open buys and sells based on fairly common buy and sell signals and keep doing that and never close a position. That is certainly the way some people come on here and show their back-testing results with apparently 100% win rate systems.
I agree that auto trading reduces your effort but it enters and exits trades for no reason, sometimes. These systems are programmed to buy and sell on the basis of some common signals. They keep doing it and never close a position. This misleads a lot of traders when they backtest their strategies.
This is one of the problems many traders like you have been facing when using auto-trading, since it sometimes enters and exit trades without you having any knowledge about the reason. The reason could be the programming that makes them buy and sell according to certain market signals. So, whilst you backtest your strategy, there could be a lot of chances to get misled. I’d suggest you to permanently turn it off.
I have been a manual trader always. I am not sure how people trust a computer program to trade for them. I mean there are so many new things that might come your way. I like to be the master of my own trades and manual trading lets me do that.