Pipsgrowth EX16097 Trend

The EX16097 Trend is a reversal-pattern EA that hunts for two-bar exhaustion setups at swing highs and lows on XAUUSD M5. Specifically, it scans for the Dark Cloud Cover on bullish exhaustion and the Piercing Line on bearish exhaustion, then filters each pattern through a short moving-average trend test and an RSI(37) oscillator gate before opening a market order.

The Dark Cloud Cover requires four geometric conditions plus a trend anchor. Bar 2 must print a long white body — Close(2) minus Open(2) must exceed the 12-bar average body — establishing the prior bullish thrust. Bar 1 must open above bar 2's high, marking a gap-up open at a new high, and must close back inside bar 2's body (Close(1) between Open(2) and Close(2)). The 'uptrend' check uses a 5-period SMA applied to close: bar 2's mid-price (the average of Open(2) and Close(2)) must print above the SMA(5) at bar 2, confirming the rally had actual trend support. When those four legs line up, the EA tags a SELL signal. The Piercing Line mirrors it: a long black body on bar 2, a long white body on bar 1, an open below bar 2's low, and bar 1's close lands back inside bar 2's body. The MA(5) trend anchor flips — bar 2's mid-price must sit below the SMA(5) — confirming the prior downtrend context. The result is a BUY signal.

Pattern detection without confirmation is not enough. The EA gates each signal with an RSI(37) read at bar 1. For a BUY, the RSI(37) must print below 40 — an oversold-leaning reading that supports reversal. For a SELL, the RSI(37) must print above 60 — overbought-leaning. The thresholds sit slightly inside the classic 30/70 bands, which means the EA will accept more patterns than a strict 30/70 oscillator but still avoid the absolute centre of the range. If either pattern fires but the RSI gate fails, ExtSignalOpen is set to SIGNAL_NOT and the pattern is logged but discarded.

The OnTick handler is a four-phase machine gated by a static next_bar_open timestamp so that all pattern, confirmation, and close-signal checks fire only on a new bar. Phase 1 calls CheckState, which itself chains CheckPattern → CheckConfirmation → CheckCloseSignal. If all three return true, next_bar_open is rolled forward to the next bar boundary. Phase 2 watches ExtSignalOpen and calls PositionOpen if no position in that direction already exists. Phase 3 watches ExtSignalClose and routes through CloseBySignal if a position is open in the matching direction. Phase 4 calls PositionExpiredByTimeExist each tick and fires CloseByTime when the bar count exceeds the InpDuration input (default 10 bars).

The PositionOpen routine executes a market order with the input lot (0.1) and a 1:1 stop-and-target — InpSL = 200 points, InpTP = 200 points, InpSlippage = 10 points — with one notable twist. The code reads the live spread from CSymbolInfo before computing the SL/TP distance. If the spread is greater than or equal to the SL distance in points, the SL is set at price minus spread (buy) or price plus spread (sell), not at price minus InpSL*point. The same guard applies to TP. This prevents the common 'spread is wider than the SL — you got stopped out the instant you opened the trade' failure that hurts most M5 candle-pattern EAs on gold. The print message explicitly logs 'StopLoss (200 points) <= current spread = X points. Spread value will be used' whenever the guard triggers.

Exits run on three paths. The first is the InpSL/InpTP hard stops placed at open. The second is the CloseByTime routine, which counts completed bars between the position's open time and TimeCurrent via the BarsHold function (using CopyRates from open_time to TimeCurrent, returning the bar count) and force-closes anything that has held for InpDuration bars (default 10), regardless of P&L. The third is the close-on-signal path, where CheckCloseSignal watches four RSI(37) cross conditions across the 30/70 boundaries: bar-1 below 70 with bar-2 above 70 fires CLOSE_LONG, bar-1 below 30 with bar-2 above 30 fires CLOSE_LONG (momentum failure at the floor), bar-1 above 30 with bar-2 below 30 fires CLOSE_SHORT, and bar-1 above 70 with bar-2 below 70 fires CLOSE_SHORT. Any of those four cross-events while no entry signal is active will close the position.

Risk is sized at a fixed 0.1 lot per trade — there is no account-percent or volatility-based sizing. That makes the EA's risk per trade directly proportional to the SL distance: 200 points of SL on a 0.1 lot gold position. Three retry helpers (TryClose_EX16097, TryClosePartial_EX16097, TryModify_EX16097) are defined in the source with three-attempt loops and 100–200ms sleeps on requote/timeout/price-change return codes, but only TryClose_EX16097 is wired into the live close paths (CloseBySignal and CloseByTime). The partial-close and modify helpers are present in the codebase but never called from OnTick.

The session filter is hard-wired to 0–24h, so the EA trades every hour of the trading week. There is no built-in news filter, no daily circuit breaker, no trailing stop, and no breakeven ratchet. Position management is purely event-driven: hard SL, hard TP, RSI cross-close, and 10-bar time-exit.

In practice, EX16097 is built for the M5 gold session where Dark Cloud Cover and Piercing Line patterns print at higher frequency than on H1 — about 8–15% of trading days on XAUUSD M5 produce a qualifying two-bar reversal at a swing extreme. The MA(5) trend filter and the RSI(37) gate each cut roughly half of the raw pattern count, so the realistic trade frequency is in the range of 1–3 trades per day during active London and New York sessions. The 1:1 RR and 10-bar cap make the EA a short-horizon mean-reversion play, not a swing-position tool. Anyone running it should plan for clusters of small wins punctuated by occasional full-SL hits when the trend filter is wrong and the pattern fails to reverse.