Pipsgrowth EX16077 Trend

SmoothEngine is built around a single principle: only enter when the market is actually trending, not when it is merely moving. The CSmoothEngine class embeds four hand-rolled indicators directly into the EA — a Hull Moving Average, a linear regression slope over that HMA, a custom Average True Range series, and a Choppiness Index built from the same ATR and bar range. None of these pull from MT5's iMA / iRSI / iATR handles; every value is calculated bar-by-bar inside the class from raw close, high, and low arrays. That makes the EA self-contained: it carries its own indicator stack, recalculating on every closed bar, and the only time it touches the broker is through price feeds and order tickets.

The signal itself is built from two filters acting on the bar at shift=1. First, the Choppiness Index over a 14-bar window is compared against a threshold of 61.8 — a value widely associated with non-trending, range-bound markets. If CI is above 61.8, the engine returns zero, meaning do not trade. The bar is skipped, no order is sent, and the dashboard reads WAIT. Second, on the same closed bar, a linear regression slope is fitted over the most recent 14 HMA values and then normalized by ATR. The normalization is the second gatekeeper: by dividing slope by ATR, the engine compares the rate of HMA change against current volatility rather than absolute price change. When normalized slope is positive, the EA returns +1 and opens a long; when negative, it returns -1 and opens a short. Because the slope is divided by ATR, the signal adapts to whichever volatility regime the symbol is currently in, so a trend that looks flat in points may still register as a positive slope in a quiet market.

The on-tick flow is deliberately short. The engine first checks IsTradingTime and CheckSpread, returning early if the current server time falls outside the configured 08:00-20:00 window or if the live spread exceeds 30 points. When a new bar opens, OnTick reads the previous bar's close, high, and low into the engine, calls GetSignal, and decides what to do. If the signal is opposite to an open position, CloseAllTrades is invoked for the wrong side first — a clean flip rather than an average-down. If the signal direction has no position yet, a single market order opens with a stop loss 300 points behind, take profit 600 points ahead (a fixed 1:2 risk-to-reward baked into the geometry), and a lot size calculated from 1% of account balance relative to that 300-point stop. The hard 1:2 ratio means a 45% win rate already keeps the system flat, and the Choppiness filter is designed to keep the EA out of the chop windows where that ratio breaks down.

Where SmoothEngine goes beyond a basic trend follower is the pyramiding path. EnablePyramiding is on by default and MaxOpenTrades is set to 3, so a single trend can accumulate up to three positions on the same side. Each additional entry is gated by PyramidingStep_Points = 200. The check uses GetLastTradeProfit on the most recent ticket of the same direction, divides that profit in account currency by the symbol's point value, and only opens the next layer when the previous layer has moved more than 200 points into profit. The result is a winner-adds, losers-cap pattern: the EA never averages into a losing position, but it scales into a confirmed trend, and risk per trade remains constant because CalculateLotSize is invoked on every new entry using the live balance. This produces an interesting curve: a slow-mover trend typically opens only one position and gives back the unrealized profit before the SL fires, while a fast-mover trend opens two or three layers, each with its own 1:2 RR target, letting the position compound without the trader lifting the risk per trade.

The risk stack is minimal but explicit. CalculateLotSize converts balance × 1% into a lot count by solving for the volume that would lose StopLoss_Points × point-size on the current symbol, then clamps to the broker's volume min, max, and step. There is no dynamic risk scaling, no equity curve filter, no daily P&L circuit breaker, and no maximum drawdown input. The single loss-control lever is the per-trade SL, and the only no-trade gates are time-of-day and spread. This makes the EA's behavior easy to reason about in backtest: every entry has a known maximum loss, every cycle either wins TP, loses SL, or gets closed by a reverse signal. For traders who want a daily guard, the natural extension is to drop a second EA on the chart as a money-management overlay rather than modifying SmoothEngine itself.

The dashboard is a small but functional piece of the design. It draws a 200×160 black panel in the upper-right corner, with a signal label (BUY in blue, SELL in red, WAIT in gray), a live P/L line that sums open positions on the chart's symbol, and the current HMA period. Two buttons let the trader nudge the HMA period up or down without recompiling — pressing [+] increments g_HMA_Period and calls ReinitializeEngine, which deletes the old CSmoothEngine, allocates a new one, and reloads the indicator stack from history. A red CLOSE ALL button flattens both sides of the book with one click. The dashboard is wired through OnChartEvent and uses raw ObjectCreate / ObjectSet calls rather than the standard library panels, which is why it survives both tick-rate changes and the HMA period toggle without leaving orphaned objects on the chart.

What SmoothEngine does not do is also part of its design. There is no ATR-based trailing stop; once SL and TP are written, they are not modified again. There is no break-even ratchet, no partial close, no time-based exit beyond the IsTradingTime window, and no news filter. The retry helpers TryClosePartial_EX16077 and TryModify_EX16077 are defined for the standard error-recovery pattern (requote, timeout, price-changed) but neither is called from OnTick — they sit as dead code, presumably scaffolding for a future modular extension. The single wired helper, TryClose_EX16077, handles the close-side of the reverse-signal flip with three attempts and a 200ms sleep on retryable errors. If a position is open and a reverse signal fires, the close goes through this retry wrapper, which means the EA tolerates one or two requotes before giving up — a sensible compromise for an EA that fires orders on a new-bar event rather than continuously.

Practical considerations for running it: the EA is symbol-agnostic and works on FX majors, gold, and other metals. The default 1% risk with a 30-pip stop means roughly 0.03 lot on XAUUSD at a $1,000 account, scaling proportionally elsewhere. TradingHours is parsed as a HH:MM-HH:MM string; passing an invalid format will silently default the engine to always-trade because the four StringFind-based getters return 0/0 or 23/59 on bad input. The 30-point MaxSpread_Points is appropriate for a $1-2 commission account on gold but may need to be relaxed to 50 or more on a retail FX broker during the Asian session. Pyramiding requires the broker to allow multiple positions per symbol with the same magic — netting accounts will only ever show one open trade per side, and the third layer will be silently rejected. Magic 22216077, comment Psgrowth.com Expert_16077.