Pipsgrowth EX18088 TrendFollow

EX18088 is a deliberately small MQL5 Expert Advisor that, instead of carrying its own indicator stack, wires three modules out of the MQL5 standard library onto the CExpert base class. A trader who opens the .mq5 will see the entire trading decision laid out in a single OnInit: a CSignalMA signal object is constructed and tuned to a 12-period Simple Moving Average with a 6-bar shift along the time axis, applied to close; a CTrailingPSAR trailing object is built and configured with step 0.02 and maximum 0.2 (the Wilder defaults); and a CMoneySizeOptimized money manager is attached with Percent=10.0 and DecreaseFactor=3.0. OnTick is one line — ExtExpert.OnTick() — and the standard library takes over from there, doing indicator reads, signal evaluation, order placement, and SAR-driven trailing modifications on its own. The only piece of code the author wrote themselves, beyond the wiring, is three CTrade retry wrappers (TryClose_EX18088, TryClosePartial_EX18088, TryModify_EX18088) that attempt each operation up to three times with a 200ms or 100ms sleep when the broker returns REQUOTE, TIMEOUT, PRICE_OFF, or PRICE_CHANGED. There are no custom indicator handles, no regime classifier, no news filter, no time window, no multi-timeframe confirm, no partial-close logic in the body, and no drawdown breaker — every behavioral rule lives inside the three library modules.

The signal half is the easiest to describe because it is the unmodified CSignalMA. The standard library's MA signal does not fire on a simple cross of price through the moving average; it fires when the moving average itself is sloping in the right direction AND price is on the correct side of the average. A long requires the 12-bar SMA at bar-shift 6 to be higher than the same SMA one bar earlier (slope up) and the close at bar 1 to be above that shifted MA value. A short is the mirror. The 6-bar shift is unusual — most MA signals read at shift 0 — and it is the most consequential single number in the input set. By the time the slope check fires, the SMA has had six completed bars to settle, so the cross is filtering for established directional moves rather than reacting to bar-zero noise. The flip side is the lag: this EA will give back part of every move before it enters, and it will exit late when a trend reverses. That tradeoff is the design, not a bug.

The trailing half is the unmodified CTrailingPSAR. The Parabolic SAR is calculated by the standard library on every tick from the same step (0.02) and maximum (0.2) that Wilder originally specified, and the trailing object ratchets the position's stop-loss to the SAR value whenever the SAR dot advances in the trade's favor. There is no fixed take-profit set at entry, so the position is held until the SAR flips to the opposite side of price, at which point CTrailingPSAR closes it. An opposite-direction MA cross on the signal object also forces a close of the existing position before the new entry fires, which means the MA cross itself doubles as a reversal exit. The two exits are not identical — the SAR flip can close a position that the MA slope still agrees with (a sharp pullback that bends the dot), and the MA cross can close a position that the SAR has not yet flipped on (a slow drift that bends the slope first). In practice, the SAR tends to fire first on sharp XAUUSD pullbacks and the MA cross tends to fire first on slow grinds.

The money half is what most distinguishes EX18088 from a vanilla MA-cross EA. CMoneySizeOptimized does not use a fixed risk percentage of the account balance. Instead, it computes the lot as 10% of free margin (the Percent input), but it remembers whether the previous closed deal was profitable or losing. After a loss, it reduces the next lot by the DecreaseFactor, which is 3.0. The reduction compounds: two losses in a row cut the lot further, three losses cut it again, and so on, until a winning trade resets the sizing to the base Percent value. The intent is a loss-adaptive anti-martingale — losing streaks shrink subsequent positions instead of doubling them, so a rough patch cannot escalate exposure. The cost is that a single win after several losses will trade a much smaller lot than the equity implies, which slows recovery. There is no risk-percent stop in this EA, so position sizing is governed entirely by the SizeOptimized module and the broker's free margin.

Because the file is a thin wrapper, there is very little to configure. The signal section exposes PeriodMA, Shift, Method (default MODE_SMA), and the applied-price code; the trailing section exposes the SAR Step and Maximum; the money section exposes DecreaseFactor and Percent. The magic number is 22218088 and the trade comment is 'Psgrowth.com Expert_18088', so multiple instances of this EA on the same account can coexist as long as they run on different symbols or timeframes. There is no OnTester fitness function, no optimization log, and no information panel on the chart. Three-retry close and three-retry modify wrappers handle the broker's volatile-return codes so that a single requote does not orphan a position.

What to expect in a backtest is the standard MA-cross-and-PSAR profile: a moderate number of trades, long hold times relative to the period, an equity curve that runs in long flat sections punctuated by sudden trend extensions, and drawdowns that reflect the fact that the 6-bar shift gives back roughly 30 minutes of move on M5 before it confirms. The SizeOptimized money means the worst streaks in the backtest will visibly shrink the lot size trade by trade, and the recovery from those streaks will be slower than a fixed-percent EA on the same account. The most useful knob to tune first is the MA shift — lowering it from 6 to 2 or 3 produces more trades and tighter risk per trade at the cost of more false crosses, and raising it produces the opposite.