I looked at various trailing stop approaches in my EA, and not really happy.
I guess there is no holy grail there, but I’d like to ask how you approach trailing stop, especially if you do MQL4…
I tried the usual, start trailing once you are in plus, and then trailing, or trailing right after you open your postion.
I did not try variable trailing stop size. Not sure yet how to approach that.
Anyone willing to share their experience?
T
Hi Tky,
Can you expand on what your results are with your trailing stops in your EA. What don’t you like about them? Stopped out too early, etc.
Hello,
I use trailing stop for TP more than 50pips. If I earned 50 pips TS come to breakeven and move the TS by the increment of pips.
For small targets there is an EA called trailingator. Actually that is a paid one. But if you google hopefully you can find a freebie version.
Thank you for the replies.
>> To Jonathan:
It’s not really that I don’t like them, I just wanted to ask how people use it.
The trailing stop in MT4 starts to move SL once you have at least your trailing stop amount of profit. E.g. if your trailing stop is 10pips, then nothing will happen until you have 10pips profit. Looking at my transactions I was finding a lot of transactions that were in some profit, less than 10 though, so TS did not trigger and in most cases they became loosing trades. (Of course, maybe my strategy was not the best, but that is a totally different subject.)
So i was wondering if there is a better way…
Since the original post I implemented a variable trailing stop approach. Well, not fully variable, just 2 TS levels, initial and regular. Initial would be smaller, e.g. 3-4 pips in this case, and regular would be at 10.
So the way it works is simple. Once you have INITIAL TS profit, then move SL by initial TS value, and then switch to regular. The idea was to lock the initial profit, and hope for bigger winner.
Yes, using small initial TS value exposes me to market volatility where I could be kicked out of the trade. Though it seemed to work for me overall. I ended up with above 50% winning transactions. Most of them were small, as expected, but hey, they were winners afterall!
Anyway, the question is still open.
I am looking forward to hear how others use TS… Anyone else using variable TS?
Or if you are not using TS, but maybe use support/resistance for your exit, then please comment too. I’d like to explore that as well.
>>To Alanamc:
Thank you for sharing your approach. Your approach is very straightforward.
I will check the trailingator. Curious what it does differently from MT4 TS.
i dabbled with trailing stops back in my stocks trading days. i never liked them. oh sure all the articles and videos seem to show them as these magical fail-safe / protect-all-your-money techniques, but the biggest problem is DITHER. dither is the somewhat random small movements of the price as it goes from point A to point B. it’s the noise that a proper averaging smooths out. only problem is that the trailing stop doesn’t work on averages but on the raw data.
i don’t use automating trailing stops. i just watch the trade live as it happens, and if the overall movement appears to be going well i leave it alone as best i can (unless i get a bit too excited and giddy), and if it looks to be wafting or fizzling out then i bail at what i hope is a decent price that maybe even nets me 0.3pips of profit.
you can try adaptive trailing stops, that use a factor like ATR or volatility. This will allow you to take that noise into account. In general for creating mechanical systems, stops hurt your performance. But they are a necessary evil.
tky,
I think I agree with your approach. What you are doing with the trailing stops is what I do manually. Good to hear you are having some success with it.
Thanks. It’s my EA that is doing the “watching”, so that’s why i’m looking for more ideas.
Would you like to share how you judge the “wafting or fizzling out”?
T
Thank you, I will explore that.
Already googled that and found other ATR related links, which triggered more other ideas. I wish days was a bit longer! I need more time to implement these ideas.
T
Thanks for that feedback.
I actually think that using Support/Resistance would probably be a better approach to exits, but this is far more complex to code in MQL4 (at least as I see it now). Though I will attempt that.
T
i watch all trades 100%. i use MACD and UltOsc as indicators (plus volume on my timed charts). and of course i watch the price itself.