Pipsgrowth EX18104 TrendFollow

Pipsgrowth EX18104 is a single-indicator mean-reversion EA designed to harvest short-term reversals out of deeply overstretched RSI conditions during the Asian session. The logic is intentionally lopsided: it treats exhaustion of the bearish side as a much more extreme event than exhaustion of the bullish side, which is encoded in the asymmetric OverboughtLevel / OversoldLevel thresholds. The buy path activates when the 28-period RSI on a 15-minute bar drops through 8 — a level so deep that on AUDUSD M15 it fires only a handful of times per month, on the kind of capitulation candle that often marks a local low. The sell path, by contrast, activates the moment RSI climbs back above 60, a moderate overbought reading that fires much more frequently and is best understood as "fade strength in a still-rangey tape" rather than "fade a runaway trend." This split is the EA's signature design choice and the reason it can run on a single timeframe / single indicator without becoming a noise magnet.

The Asian-session gate is the second pillar. All order logic is wrapped in IsAsianSession(), which uses TimeToStruct on the server clock and admits only the hours 00:00–07:59 UTC. Outside that window the EA simply returns. If CloseOutsideSession is flipped on, the first tick of every non-Asian hour triggers CloseAllTrades() to flatten — useful for traders who want zero exposure during London and New York. With the default false setting, open positions are allowed to drift through the rest of the day and rely on the EA's other exit paths. The session flag is also surfaced on the on-chart info panel as the third row, so the user can confirm at a glance which window the EA considers active.

Indicator handling is minimal. OnInit calls iRSI(_Symbol, PERIOD_M15, RSIPeriod, PRICE_CLOSE) and copies three values into a reverse-ordered array; if the buffer is not ready after ten 100 ms retries it falls back to 50.0 / 50.0 / 50.0 and proceeds. The bar timeframe is hardcoded — the user can change RSIPeriod (default 28) but cannot change the chart timeframe that feeds the buffer. On every tick where the session gate passes and the spread is below the configured cap, OnTick refills rsiCurrent, rsiPrevious, and rsiPrevious2, then calls CheckRSICrossover() to set three booleans: rsiCrossedOversold, rsiCrossedOverbought, rsiCrossedExitLevel. Crossover here means a one-bar transition: prior value on one side of the threshold, current value on the other side, with no smoothing or averaging applied.

Entry logic is in the !hasOpenPosition block at the bottom of OnTick. The buy branch fires when rsiCrossedOversold is true — meaning RSI has just printed at or below 8 after being above 8 the bar before — and the ask is inside the MaxSpread cap. trade.Buy(MaxLotSize, _Symbol, currentAsk, sl, tp, InpTradeComment) is called with 3-point deviation and ORDER_FILLING_IOC. With the defaults UseStopLoss = false and UseTakeProfit = false, the SL/TP parameters passed to CTrade evaluate to 0/0, so the trade is opened as a pure mean-reversion position with no protective bracket. The sell branch mirrors that on the overbought cross above 60, opening at the bid with the same filling and slippage rules. The MaxLotSize = 0.1 input is a hard cap rather than a risk-based sizing — there is no balance-relative calculation, no percentage-of-equity input, and no SL-distance-based scaling.

Exits are layered. The primary path is the RSI exit: with UseRSIExit = true and RSIExitLevel = 55, a long position is closed the moment rsiCurrent crosses above 55 after being below, and a short position is closed the moment RSI crosses below 55 after being above. The 55 level is intentionally slightly bullish — it requires a long to actually climb back into the upper half of the RSI range before the EA is willing to take profit, while a short can exit as soon as RSI weakens to 55, making the long exit structurally more patient than the short exit. The secondary path is the time stop: MaxDuration = 270 hours (about 11.25 days) — if the position is still open past that window, CloseAllTrades("Timeout") is called from the open-position block. The third path is the optional session-end flatten, which only runs when CloseOutsideSession is true. There is no break-even move, no trailing stop, and no partial close in the live code path; the retry helpers TryClosePartial_EX18104 and TryModify_EX18104 are declared in the source but never wired in.

The on-chart panel (CreatePanel / UpdatePanel) is a 200×200 pixel OBJ_RECTANGLE_LABEL at PanelX = 10, PanelY = 20 with seven rows at 8-point font: RSI value, position status (Long / Short / None), spread in pips, current session name (Asian / London / New York / Other), the configured StopLossPips, the configured TakeProfitPips, and the most recent crossover label. Note that the panel always reports the configured SL and TP values rather than the values actually attached to the open position — with the defaults of UseStopLoss = false and UseTakeProfit = false, the panel will show "Stop Loss: 5 pips" and "Take Profit: 175 pips" even though the live position was opened with 0/0 brackets. This is a display artifact, not a trading error: the underlying position is unbracketed, but the panel shows what would be used if those booleans were enabled.

There are a few small things worth knowing before live use. The MaxSpread = 1000 input is documented as "in pips" but is actually compared in raw points — at 1000, on a 5-digit broker that is 10 pips, so it does not gate typical AUDUSD M15 conditions. The session gate runs on the broker server time, not the user's local time, and the Asian session is defined as 00:00–07:59 UTC; on brokers with GMT+2 or GMT+3 server time the window shifts accordingly. CloseAllTrades() has a leftover hasOurPositions flag with a hardcoded magic of 123456 inside an unused branch — harmless because the actual close loop iterates by _Symbol regardless, but worth noting if you read the source. The EA holds at most one position at a time and does not pyramid.

In a backtest, the realistic expectation is a low-frequency, high-precision profile: the OversoldLevel = 8 path is rare and should carry the bulk of the profit-per-trade, while the OverboughtLevel = 60 path is the workhorse and will produce a denser trade log. Curves tend to be choppy during trending sessions (when the buy path sits dormant and the sell path takes small losses against the trend) and clean during range-bound Asian hours. Risk is concentrated entirely in the time stop — without a hard stop-loss attached, a position that drifts against the EA's view is held until either the RSI exit fires or the 270-hour cap kicks in, so a single bad entry can give back a meaningful slice of monthly P&L. This is an EA for traders who want a session-defined, asymmetric reversion footprint and are comfortable letting the time stop do the work that a hard SL would do on a more conventional strategy.