Pipsgrowth EX03021 Grid

Pipsgrowth EX03021 GridXPro is a directional long grid EA that builds a single one-sided ladder of buy orders whenever the position stack is empty, and unwinds the whole basket as soon as combined unrealized P/L clears a profit threshold. There are no indicators and no per-trade stops. The only analytical input is the price ladder itself, expressed in InpGridStep (default 50 points). On every tick where CountOpen() returns zero and the static active flag is false, the EA fires a market buy at the current ask (TryBuy_EX03021(InpInitialLot, ask, 0, 0, ...)) and then immediately arms a sequence of pending BuyLimit orders at descending prices: ask - i * InpGridStep * _Point for i = 1 to InpMaxLevels - 1 (default InpMaxLevels = 10, so the ladder has 9 pending limits stacked under the entry). The active flag prevents the same ladder from being rebuilt until the basket is closed and reset.

The lot for each pending limit follows one of two regimes selected by InpMartingale. When the boolean is false (the safer default), every level trades InpInitialLot (0.01). When true, level i trades NormalizeDouble(InpInitialLot * pow(InpMultiplier, i), 2) — so with the default InpMultiplier = 1.5 and 10 levels, the bottom of the stack reaches 0.01 × 1.5^9 = 0.38 lots, and the geometric sum across the 10 levels is around 0.65 lots of notional exposure. The martingale switch is therefore the single most consequential input in the entire file: it transforms the EA from a flat-scaling grid into a convex one, and most users will leave it off.

The exit is also a single all-or-nothing rule. OnTick reads the combined unrealized P/L of every position whose POSITION_MAGIC matches InpMagicNumber (22203021) via BasketProfit(), and compares it to InpGridStep * _Point * CountOpen() * 100 * 0.5. The threshold therefore scales linearly with both the grid step and the number of open levels — fill the ladder deeper, and the basket needs a larger dollar move in the favorable direction to trigger the close. When the threshold is reached the EA calls CloseAll(), which walks PositionsTotal() in reverse and calls trade.PositionClose(ticket) on each magic-matching ticket (wrapped by TryClose_EX03021), and then walks OrdersTotal() and trade.OrderDelete(ticket) on each magic-matching pending order. The active flag is reset, and the next empty-state tick will rebuild a fresh ladder. There is no per-trade take-profit and no per-trade stop-loss on any individual order; the only exit is the basket-level trip.

The protective stack around this simple core is fairly conservative. IsSafeToTrade_EX03021 returns false and the EA short-circuits when any of these conditions hold: not inside an active session (no Saturday/Sunday, plus London 7-16 GMT ∪ New York 12-21 GMT when InpUseGMTSessions is true — detected through the EA's own DetectGMTOffset_EX03021, which tests every offset from -12 to +12 and picks the one that scores highest on weekday-in-range plus hour-in-trading-day); TimeCurrent() < g_cooldownUntil; equity below InpEquityFloor; cumulative realized P/L for the day below -InpDailyLossLimit; weekly P/L below -InpWeeklyLossLimit; account balance at or above the InpCapitalCap ceiling; daily trade count at or above InpMaxTradesPerDay (50); or g_consecLossesHD >= InpMaxConsecLosses when that input is positive. Note the cooldown path is also triggered independently through OnTradeTransaction: whenever a closed deal for this magic shows a negative total (profit + swap + commission), the function increments g_consecLossesHD; once the count reaches 3 (a hardcoded threshold inside the transaction handler, separate from the InpMaxConsecLosses gate which is 0 by default) the EA sets g_cooldownUntil = TimeCurrent() + InpCooldownMinutes * 60 — 30 minutes by default. So even with InpMaxConsecLosses = 0 and InpMaxTradesPerDay = 50 left as the permissive defaults, the EA will still pause for half an hour after three back-to-back losses.

The trade functions are simple retry wrappers. TryBuy_EX03021 first clamps the lot down to the symbol's SYMBOL_VOLUME_STEP and within SYMBOL_VOLUME_MIN/MAX, then calls OrderCalcMargin to make sure margin is available — if marginRequired > ACCOUNT_MARGIN_FREE it prints a denial and returns without sending. The actual trade.Buy(...) is attempted up to three times, retrying only on TRADE_RETCODE_REQUOTE, _TIMEOUT, _PRICE_OFF, or _PRICE_CHANGED after a Sleep(200); any other retcode breaks the loop. TryBuyLimit_EX03021, TryClose_EX03021, and TryOrderDelete_EX03021 follow the same 3-attempt / 200 ms pattern. trade.SetDeviationInPoints(30) allows up to 3.0 pips of slippage on the market entry; pending limits are sent without deviation (they sit on the book until filled or deleted). The EA deliberately uses the symbol's current SYMBOL_VOLUME_STEP rather than a hardcoded 0.01, so it adapts to brokers that step in 0.001 or 0.1 lots.

OnTester returns a single number that drives the strategy tester optimizer: (profit / maxDD) * (pf > 1 ? pf : 0), guarded by maxDD > 0 and trades >= 10. The two factors are multiplied rather than added, so an optimizer that maximizes this value will favor profiles with both a high profit/maxDD ratio (calm equity) and a profit factor above 1.0. Below 10 trades the function returns 0, which means the optimizer will never promote a short backtest that doesn't actually trade — useful because empty grid ladders can produce a flat equity curve with zero trades and that should rank last, not first.

For live use, the relevant decisions are almost all the input values, not the logic. The default ladder of 10 levels with InpGridStep = 50 points and InpInitialLot = 0.01 requires roughly 0.10 lots of notional margin at the entry level, scaling up to about 0.65 lots notional if martingale is enabled. A broker with reasonable swap rates is preferable because the EA is designed to hold the basket for hours or days while the unwind completes; account types that pay negative swap on long gold or long majors will see the basket profit target erode quietly. Because the basket close scans PositionsTotal() for magic matches on every tick, the EA should be run on a single chart per symbol — running it twice on the same symbol (or on a different magic but same symbol with overlapping orders) will produce double-close races when both instances think the basket is theirs. The capital cap (InpCapitalCap > 0) is an underused but powerful safety: setting it to the maximum balance you want this EA to ever manage means the EA refuses to keep trading once the account has grown past that ceiling, which protects against unattended runaway compounding.