Trading Rules

EA Studio strategies consist of three parts:

1. Strategy Properties – the trading amount, Stop Loss, and Take Profit;
2. Entry Rules – indicators that determine the conditions for opening a position;
3. Exit Rules – indicators that determine the conditions for closing the position.

Every part of the strategy is responsible for a specific task.

In order to make the strategies and exported Experts fast and reliable, we provide a predefined strategy structure. This is the main difference between the experts created with EA Studio and the experts written manually in MQL. All EA Studio EAs follow a specific design that guarantees that the backtest and the subsequent MetaTrader historical test and trade will be equal.

This approach to strategies/EAs has several very important advantages:

• it provides an unlimited number of combinations;
• the backtest is extremely fast and the automatic generation of experts is possible;
• the backtest is extremely reliable;
• live trading signals correspond to the backtest signals (provided that there is no slippage).

EA Studio follows strict trading rules:

1. All positions open at the beginning of a bar. (We use the term Bar Open to identify that. Bar Open is the first tick of a new bar.)
2. The strategies are symmetrical – the long trading rules perfectly mirror the short entry rules, in the opposite direction. This principle guarantees that the strategies will work on both bullish and bearish markets. If a pattern is identified, they will act on it.
3. This is why you set only long trading rules in the indicator slots.
4. The strategy(or exported Expert) will open a position when all the Entry Rules are satisfied.
5. If there are no Entry Rules the strategy won't open a position.
6. If all available Entry Rules are satisfied in both directions this means there is no “clear” signal to indicate in which direction to trade therefore the strategy will abstain from opening a position.
7. The strategy will close its positions at Bar Open. Exceptions are the Stop Loss and the Take Profit.
8. If there are no Exit Rules, the program will close every open position at the beginning of the next bar.
9. If there are Exit Rules, the strategy will close its positions when only one Exit Rule is satisfied. Similar to Entry Rules the Exit Rules are symmetrical for long and for short positions.

You can find more info and examples in the other sections of this help.