Pipsgrowth EX18020 TrendFollow

EX18020 ships as a surgically repaired version of an earlier USDJPY scalp strategy. The original v1.00 system leaned on martingale lot-doubling, a recovery take-profit, and a 20-pip grid that stacked losing positions until price reversed. In v2.00 every one of those mechanisms has been removed at the source level. There is no lot multiplier between trades. There is no recovery TP that averages into a position. There is no grid backup. The result is a single-position, fixed-fractional scalper where each entry stands or falls on its own, sized to risk 0.5 percent of effective capital per trade.

The signal engine is built on a deliberately loose RSI plus MACD confluence. The OnTick handler reads the last closed bar only — never the still-forming bar — and runs the CoreSignal function on RSI(7) and MACD(8, 17, 9). The RSI arm fires long when the closed-bar RSI prints below 35 (InpRSIOversold) or short when it prints above 65 (InpRSIOverbought). The MACD arm fires long when the MACD main line crosses above the signal line on bar[1] after being equal-or-below on bar[2], and short on the mirror cross. Either arm is sufficient to produce a direction; the function returns a confidence score between zero and one hundred derived from whichever arm was stronger.

Confirmation runs in the ConfirmEntry gate. The EA pulls the H1 EMA(50) value via the g_hHTFEMA handle and demands that the closed-bar close be on the trend-correct side: a long signal requires close above the H1 EMA(50), a short signal requires close below. Spread must be at or below 35 points (InpMaxSpreadPts), and the current hour must fall inside the SESSION_START_HOUR to SESSION_END_HOUR window — 6 to 21 server time. Anything outside those checks is rejected with a labelled reason printed to the Experts log.

The regime classifier is a seven-state machine driven by ADX(14), ATR(14) percentile, and Bollinger Band width. StrongTrend is the top tier with ADX at or above 30. WeakTrend covers ADX between the InpADXMin threshold (20) and 30. Expand fires when the current ATR sits above the 70th percentile of the 60-bar lookback AND the current Bollinger width exceeds the previous bar's width by 1.15 times. Compress fires when the ATR percentile is below 25. Breakout fires when the band width collapses below 0.0015 and ADX is rising. Range and Choppy catch the rest. Choppy is the only state hard-blocked by NoTradeBlock; the others are allowed through to the entry path.

Risk management is layered. The NoTradeBlock function checks capital-cap floor, daily loss limit of 3 percent, max open trades (1), cooldown after three consecutive losses, big-candle skip when a single bar's range exceeds three ATRs, and a Friday-21 server-time weekend cut-off. The position size is computed in CalcLots by dividing the risk money (0.5 percent of effective capital) by the per-lot loss implied by the 1.5 ATR stop distance, then rounded down to the broker's volume step.

Once a position is open the ManageExits function runs on every tick. It does four things in order. First, when unrealized R reaches +1.0, it moves the stop to break-even exactly at the entry price — a one-shot modification that fires only once per ticket. Second, it closes 50 percent of the position at +1R using the partial-TP machinery, also one-shot. Third, it ratchets the stop behind price using an ATR trail of 2.0 times the ATR, only ever tightening, never loosening. Fourth, if the position has been open for 100 bars or more on the current timeframe (MAX_BARS_IN_TRADE), it force-closes the position regardless of P&L.

The exit-side checks run in OppositeAndRegimeExit. If the closed-bar RSI crosses back through the opposite threshold or the MACD prints the mirror cross, every position is closed. The same function also force-closes positions when the regime classifier returns Choppy, Range, or Compress — meaning a position entered under a trending regime will be abandoned if the market flips into a non-trending state.

Under the hood the EA carries six indicator handles: ADX(14), ATR(14), RSI(7), MACD(8, 17, 9), Bollinger Bands(20, 2.0), and the HTF EMA(50) on H1. The OnTradeTransaction hook tracks consecutive losses and arms a three-bar cooldown when the count hits COOLDOWN_AFTER_LOSS — every loss counts the same, no escalation, no lot increase. The TryEntry, TryClose_EX18020, TryClosePartial_EX18020, and TryModify_EX18020 helpers all retry up to three times on requote, timeout, price-off, or price-changed responses with a 200-millisecond pause between attempts. The dry-run flag (InpDryRun, default true) suppresses every real send so you can audit the decision log before going live.

The OnTester custom criterion is (net × profit factor) ÷ (1 + absolute drawdown), with a hard floor of 30 closed trades in the optimization pass. Anything below 30 trades returns a zero score, which makes the optimizer discard short, low-sample runs in favour of statistically meaningful results.

What EX18020 is not: it is not a martingale, not a grid, not a recovery system. The v2.00 release pinned that down explicitly in both the header block and the entry path. If you came looking for a 20-pip grid stacker, this is no longer that EA. If you came looking for a tight, one-position-at-a-time RSI/MACD scalp with ATR-based exits and capital-cap sizing, this is the rebuilt version.