I’m debating my preferred approach, and I want to know what you think. Would you rather send your take profit and stop loss levels when you submit your order, or have your EA handle them and take action when price hits X?
I have witnessed many people who seem to think that brokers cannot be trusted due to them often being counter-party to the trade. Some people believe that brokers will manipulate data to run stops and otherwise cheat their customers. I don’t personally subscribe to many of these conspiracy theories because I think they fail the Occam’s razor test. The effort it would take a major regulated broker to cut everyone their own unique numbers and not get busted seems ridiculously prohibitive to me. That being said, obfuscating TP and SL levels and handling them in the code prevents the broker from knowing what those levels are on any given trade.
On the downside, if you handle those levels programmatically and your EA has to unload/reload while a trade is open for some reason, you’re screwed, because the TP/SL numbers are no longer assigned to their variables, and you need to close the trade or handle it manually. Submitting the TP/SL with the order info and trusting the broker can be cleaner and safer in that way, especially if the EA user doesn’t understand well how the code works.
Given all of that, what do you think? Is it better to handle TP/SL in code or send it with the order?