Pipsgrowth EX04005 HAEA

Pipsgrowth EX04005 is a pure candlestick pattern recognizer, written in MQL5 for MT5 and designed to run on XAUUSD at the one-minute bar. Unlike the rest of the HAEA family, which leans on Heiken Ashi smoothing or alligator-style moving-average structure, this EA does the opposite: it strips everything back to the raw open-high-low-close tape and asks one question on every closed bar — does the shape of this candle, or the relationship between this candle and the previous one, look like a reversal pattern from classical Japanese candlestick analysis? If the answer is yes, the EA then asks a second question on a higher timeframe — is the prevailing trend alignment agreeing with the direction of the pattern? Only when both conditions hold does the EA open a market order.

The recognition layer exposes four toggleable patterns, all of which are enabled by default. The UseDoji flag arms the simplest of the four: any bar where the absolute body size is less than twenty percent of the total range (a relaxed threshold — the comment in the source notes this was widened from ten percent to capture more setups, at the cost of admitting more marginal indecision bars). The UseHammer flag looks for a bar whose lower wick is more than twice the body and whose upper wick is shorter than the body — a textbook hammer at a swing low, or a shooting star at a swing high. The UseEngulfing flag activates two complementary checks: a bullish engulfing when the current bar's body fully covers the prior bearish bar (current close above prior open, current open below prior close), and a bearish engulfing as the mirror. The UseHarami flag adds the inside-bar reversal: a bullish harami when the prior bar is bearish and the current bullish bar sits entirely within the prior body's range, and the bearish counterpart as the mirror. Each pattern has its own detection function — IsDoji, IsHammer, IsBullishEngulfing, IsBearishEngulfing, IsBullishHarami, IsBearishHarami — and the main ProcessTradingLogic walks them in priority order on the most recent closed one-minute bar.

The Timeframe1 and Timeframe2 inputs let the user pick which MT5 timeframes drive the two stages. By default, the EA inspects one-minute bars (Timeframe1=1) for the raw pattern and confirms on a five-minute chart (Timeframe2=4, mapping to M5 via the MapTimeframeInt switch). The confirm step is intentionally lightweight: it pulls the last closed value of two exponential moving averages on the higher timeframe — a fast EMA(10) and a slow EMA(20), both on close — and requires that the fast EMA sit above the slow EMA for any of the bullish pattern families (Hammer, Bullish Engulfing, Bullish Harami) and below it for the bearish families (Bearish Engulfing, Bearish Harami). A Doji signal falls through to a default true at the end of ConfirmOnHigherTimeframe, which means a doji on the primary timeframe never actually reaches the order path — Doji is registered as a signal name but is not handled by the buy or sell branch of ExecuteTrade, so it is effectively a no-trade detection rather than a tradable setup despite the input flag.

Position sizing has two paths. With UseAutoLotSize=false (the default), the EA simply sends TradeVolume=0.01 on every entry — a flat micro-lot suitable for testing on small accounts. With UseAutoLotSize=true, the EA calls CalculateLotSize, which multiplies the effective capital by RiskPercent=2.0% and divides by the margin required for one full lot at the current ask, then floors the result to the symbol's volume step, clamps it to the broker's min and max lot, and applies a hard ceiling of MaxLotSize=1.0 lots. GetEffectiveCapital honors InpCapitalCapAmount: when the cap is set to a non-zero value, the effective capital is the lesser of the cap and the current equity, so traders can pre-commit a fixed risk envelope to this EA and let the rest of the account stay untouched.

Each entry carries a fixed stop of StopLoss=50 points and a fixed take-profit of TakeProfit=75 points — a 1:1.5 reward-to-risk ratio, modest by trend-follower standards but reasonable for mean-reversion pattern setups where the goal is to capture a small corrective move rather than ride a sustained leg. The stops and targets are passed through Trade.Buy and Trade.Sell on every fill, with a margin check via OrderCalcMargin before the request is dispatched, three retries at 150-millisecond intervals on REQUOTE, TIMEOUT, PRICE_OFF, and PRICE_CHANGED, and Trade.SetDeviationInPoints(Slippage=3) to absorb minor slippage. The filling mode is auto-selected per symbol from FOK to IOC to RETURN.

Trailing stop management is optional and disabled by default. When the user toggles UseTrailingStop=true, the ManageTrailingStop function walks the open positions on every tick: for a long position, it sets a candidate new stop at the current bid minus TrailingStop=30 points and only modifies the order when the candidate is at least TrailingStep=10 points above the existing stop, preventing micro-adjustments. The mirror logic handles shorts using the ask. Because the trailing logic lives outside the bar cycle, a position can be tightened intra-bar even when no new pattern is detected, which is the right behavior for a fast-moving instrument like gold.

The risk scaffolding around the entry path is dense. IsTradeAllowed checks the live spread against MaxSpread=30 points and refuses to operate if the broker widens beyond that ceiling, which matters a lot on a one-minute bar where spreads on gold routinely burst during news. IsSafeToTrade adds a capital-floor guard at InpCapitalCapFloor=50 dollars, an equity-floor guard at InpMinEquityPercent=95% of the initial balance, a daily loss limit at InpDailyLossLimitPct=3% of effective capital, a weekly loss limit at InpWeeklyLossLimitPct=6%, a hard cap on InpMaxTradesPerDay=50, and a consecutive-losses cooldown that engages after InpMaxConsecLosses=3 losses for InpCooldownMinutes=30. The OnTradeTransaction handler updates g_realizedToday, g_realizedWeek, g_tradesToday, and g_consecLosses on every closing deal tagged with this EA's magic number, and rotates the daily counters at the first tick of a new server day.

Session control is the usual London-plus-New-York window translated to GMT. InActiveSession accepts signals when the GMT hour falls inside London (7 to 16) or New York (12 to 21), with InpAvoidAsia=true as the default — the EA will reject any bar whose only session overlap is the Asian window (0 to 7 GMT), which is the right call for a pattern EA that wants liquidity at the open of London or the overlap with New York. InpNewsFilter is off by default, but when turned on it skips bars within InpNewsFilterMinutes=15 of the London or New York session open. IsMarketOpen blocks the weekend gap using the universal Friday-22 and Sunday-22 GMT rules. DetectGMTOffset infers the server's GMT offset from the Monday opening gap on the H1 chart and falls back to zero if the auto-detection cannot lock on.

Because the EA runs on a one-minute bar, throughput is high — pattern detections are cheap, but the per-bar ProcessTradingLogic only runs on a new bar, not on every tick, so the CPU footprint stays modest. In backtesting, the EA's OnTester returns (net * profitFactor) / (1 + balance-DD-percent), gated on at least 30 trades; that formula rewards both raw profit and consistency, with the drawdown term in the denominator penalizing strategies that only make money by taking large risks. On a fast ECN or raw-spread account with reliable gold liquidity, a $100 deposit is enough to run the default micro-lot configuration; users who flip on auto-lotting should treat the 2% risk input as a per-trade ceiling rather than a target, and size up only after observing the backtest drawdown on a multi-month XAUUSD sample.