Ive thought of another method to play it.

What if, for example, we entered one trade with a TP/SL of 30/30. Then say our trade moves towards our TP 20 pips. We then add to our current position by adding another lot in the same direction, but with the same TP/SL of 30/30. This way we stagger our profits. When the first trade takes profit the second trade will be 10 pips towards it's goal of 30 TP. If it goes another 10 pips we enter another trade in the same direction just like how we added the 2nd trade on top of the 1st.

What's nice about this idea is we never add to the losing trades. We aren't hedging, so don't add to a trade that might get stopped out. What could be nice about this though, is that when you enter the second trade, it will get stopped out before the original trade gets stopped out if the market were to turn on us. So we could have a system where once the second trade gets stopped out we also close the first even though it didn't drop to that level yet. This way our losses would be -30 and -10 for the two trades as we enter a new trade in the opposite direction.

We only enter one position and again wait for it to move 20 pips in our favor to add the 2nd position. This way if it again turns on us we are only losing the -30 on that one trade rather than -30 and -10. It's also nice because it offers areas where we allow the market to turn on us without erasing all of our profits. What if we have two trades triggered, the first profits, and the second loses. We would be even out of the two trades while allowing ourselves to recognize the turn in momentum early and capitalize on the new reverse trend. The problem with this idea is we may have been better off just by entering a new trade when one trade hits its TP or SL rather than staggering the trades since we close out the original trade with the second instead of allowing it to possibly close in success. We will assume it wouldn't though since price just dropped 30 pips against us and momentum will carry it further.

The benefit to staggering, is again, being able to recognize the new trend early on and being able to ride it for longer than waiting for one trade to close out on us. Matt

I like your idea. However, there are times when it would be silly to randomly enter the market. When the price is in a strong downtrend and you look at it and say "okay, ill flip a coin...the coin says to buy" that would be one of those times. Ofcourse, you are still right that just to be in the market gives you a 50% chance of winning because, frankly, the current trend doesnt mean all that much to us because we dont know how long that trend is going to last. "The trend is your friend, unless its about to end" comes to mind, so you may be onto something. Id still say using an indicator like Brain Trend to enter that down trend as it recovers from a retraction would give you a 70% chance against 50% that it will reverse though. There is one more thing that I see. You say that you would enter a position from the opposite direction if you got stopped out. So if you got stoped out of a sell, you would buy. The market doesnt usually work like though. If it goes up 50, its probly going to retract atleast 30 before it keeps going up. And that is assuming that it is even a new uptrend. If its not, then it will either retract or keep falling and you would find yourself $100 short. Id say your better off just using BrainTrend to try to predict the new trends. I still like your idea though, it has a certain charm and logic, think we need to work those issues out though.

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I had an idea for a similar type of EA, but can't seem to get any programmers to bite. I think price action is the best indicator. Buying as it goes up and selling as it goes down just makes good sense. My idea was to set a take profit level based on a dollar amount if there where a mix of positions. So if there was a short, but the price action reversed and there is now a buy or two, then it closes all positions at a specific profit. If there are only buy positions, it closes all the buy positions at the point when there is a reversal and the EA should buy. I think it would be ideal to have the TP, SL, and pipstep adjusted based on the range of the pair. When it is a small range, we take smaller profits, and vice versa. This would help to counter a range where it simply goes long then short then long, etc. etc. This could blow an account if it went on long enough.

I should have been more concise by what I meant about random entry. The idea of this system is that you don't need to wait for an MA cross or some indicator to tell you it's alright to get into the market. Since indicators lag, the price may have already made it's big move and you've entered at a bad time, or you just missed out on the opportunity of making all those pips.

So it's random in that you can enter the market whenever you want. Eventually the market will correct you though. There is no flipping a coin such that you could go long when the market is actually in a down trend. The decision is made by the market.

In the basic method to trade this system you only have 1 position open. TP/SL of 30/30 for example. You enter a long trade. Price rises and hits your TP. You then immediately enter another long trade since you won the last trade. This time price falls and hits your SL. You then immediately enter a short trade. If the TP gets hit on the short trade then you enter another short trade immediately. If the SL gets hit on that short trade then that means market is going up and you are then immediately placed into a long trade.


"If it goes up 50, its probly going to retract atleast 30 before it keeps going up. And that is assuming that it is even a new uptrend. If its not, then it will either retract or keep falling and you would find yourself $100 short. Id say your better off just using BrainTrend to try to predict the new trends."

Ok, say you have a TP/SL of 30/30. You enter long, your TP gets hit on one trade and you go long again. This time price only rises another 20, to get to your 50 pip gain. It then retraces 30. So our trade, after being up 20, is now -10. It hasn't hit our SL on the second trade yet. Price then continues in the uptrend and we win the trade. Or price continues down and stops us out, which would require price to have dropped 50 from the 50 pip peak you gave us. This, in my opinion, gives the price momentum to keep dropping and therefore be profitable to enter short trades.

Thats the idea of the system. Reverse your position when you get stopped out since that is where price is going. Carry the momentum into your trade. By having set goals to break up a trend we're allowing ourselves to give up the cost of the spread, BUT we aren't concerned with finding reversals. This way we're always in the market and have the possibility of riding a trend to infinity if it wanted to. We lose on the reversals, but gain on the entire trend down minus the spreads. We're simply locking in profits.

So really the perfect TP/SL combination is one that is incredibly small such that we can change our position early after the reversal. This isn't possible because of spreads and the general market noise that would stop us out too many times.

But to reiterate. No, this system IS NOT entirely random. We don't need a set market entry point and that is random. The market will then correct us if our position is wrong and place us on the right track towards getting profits. Matt

Yea thats my biggest problem right now too. I don't know how to code this. Except for the various money management techniques possible, this is probably very easy to code.

Not sure I know what you mean by pipstep. I imagine thats EA terminology.

I do agree different TP/SL levels should be made for different pairs. Obviously you're not going to use a 30/30 TP/SL for an exotic like ZAR/JPY because you'd be making trades all day. Or you might not use 30/30 for EUR/USD because it's slower than cable and would take forever for trades to carry out.

Not sure how small we want the range to be. Get too small and simple retraces in an uptrend suddenly create 2 losing trades in a row. Too large and we risk getting shredded in a ranging market. Too large and you miss on banking many pips. We need an EA to start testing. Matt

By pipstep, I mean range. If the second positions buy 20 pips above the first, then the pipstep is 20.

I think we need the EA to change the TP, SL, and pipstep depending on the pairs range. If the pair ranges 20 pips, and the pipstep is 20, it could just keep buying high and selling low. So, some indicator would be used to reduce the pipstep to say 5, so you would get 3 winning positions in a row before a reversal.

Wouldn't the TP be the same thing as the pipstep in a simple system of buying immedietely again when one long trade ends in TP? So the idea of a pipstep would only be involved when we overlap the consecutive trades correct?

What would be the benefit of reducing the pipstep to 5? Why not reduce it to 1 and add to our positions on every tick in the direction of our current trades? But then, do we close out all of the positions when one ends in SL? This would be inefficient since the oldest trades would be at even and not in too much danger of getting stopped out yet. Although, it would signifiy a change of direction. A lot to think about.

Still not sure what you mean by pipstep though and how it's different from our TP/SL range/zone. What kind of indicator are you talking about? I'm trying to avoid indicators. Matt

if you keep adding lots to winning trades.... what happen if the trend against you? Would you move STop loss to breakeven?

That is what needs to be discusses. Like I mentioned, one option would be to add to our position as we reach certain levels. If one of those levels is at a peak and it would have been stopped out, then close all positions. This means all positions currently open except the top two would be closed in profit. The top would be at a loss and the second at break even. So in doing this strategy you always profit if there would be at least 3 wins in a row.

I’ve been doing some more thinking. What if we did the following. Enter a trade on every tick.

We have a TP/SL of 30/30. Price is at 1.9000 and we enter our first trade as long. Price goes to 1.9029. We now have 29 open orders for long. The beginning, I think, is the most risky. We’re betting in the beginning that our initial entry isn’t going to be near a maximum peak.

Anyways, price continues to 1.9050. So the last winning trade possible would be entered at 1.9020. The losers would be from 1.9021-1.9050. This is what is hard to tell what to do. Something going through my head right now is what happens if we don’t open any new positions in the opposite direction until all trades currently open close in a loss? This is bad obviously because we’ve just lost a lot of pips. Think about it though, for all of those orders to close, price would need to retrace to 1.8991. That’s a 60 pip retrace, which is somewhat significant on an intraday chart. What happens next? We enter a sell order at 1.8991.

If the market turns on us again to enter a range of 60 pips or so what happens? Well if it retraced to 1.8985 then we would have only opened 6 new sell positions from 1.8985-1.8991. It then retraces and stops out all of those orders. We then enter long at 1.9021 and it goes to 1.9050 again. There is another 29 positions opened that will lose.

The point of this idea is that it cuts down on making a lot of trades in a ranging market that doesn’t allow for profit. Would the losses here be overcome if we could capitalize on the trends at every single pip for hundreds of positions on an up or downtrend? This strategy would work best by imploring the smallest TP/SL possible so that on reversals we enter less losing trades at the end. It also takes less movement to enter a reverse position to get back on the winning side.

I don’t think this could work all that effectively since we’d be waiting to enter a reverse position for quite some time. We’d be sacrificing the opportunity of trading those pips and losing tremendously when we don't close out all the trades when the first one hits SL. Also, if we made the SL/TP small then it would be impossible to make it 50/50 inherently. If spread is 3 then we would need a TP of 6 and SL of 9 just to profit 3 pips a trade and place our entry equidistant from TP and SL. Unfortunately this means our losses are 50% larger than our wins. It affects our profit outcomes greatly. This strategy is different from what my original post was calling for. I’m just throwing this out there to hopefully spark something in the rest of you. Get you all thinking about ways to trade this to make it profitable. How can we play simple price action successfully without hedging?