Stop Placement Tradeoff Table

Most stop-placement advice picks one number and defends it. In reality a tight stop and a wide stop are not competing for the same job - they trade a bigger lot for the same risk against a lower chance of surviving normal noise, and neither side of that trade is free. This script does not resolve the tradeoff. It measures it, one candidate distance at a time, and prints the numbers so the decision is made with the actual figures in front of you rather than a rule of thumb. For every candidate stop distance in the input list, the lot size is computed from MODE_TICKVALUE and MODE_TICKSIZE so the fixed risk budget converts to a position size correctly on any symbol, gold and JPY crosses included - never a hardcoded pip value. The breakeven move is reported both in price and in pips, showing how far the market needs to travel past entry before the trade covers its own spread. Distances that fall inside the broker's stop level are flagged, and distances where the risk budget cannot even buy the minimum lot are reported as such rather than silently rounded up to a bigger risk than requested. The survival rate is the part worth reading carefully. For every historical bar in the lookback window, the script asks: if a stop this many pips away had been placed at that bar's close, would it have been hit before price moved the target distance the other way, within the forward window? That produces an honest base rate for how often a given stop distance gets touched by ordinary noise on this symbol and timeframe, before any entry logic is even considered. It is not a strategy backtest - it assumes every bar is a valid entry point, ignores spread on entry, and tests one fixed direction throughout the run - and the notes section says so plainly. Its value is comparative: a stop distance whose survival rate barely improves over one half its size is telling you something about the symbol's noise floor that a single-number rule cannot. Notes and limitations - The survival rate is a base rate for the symbol and timeframe, not a backtest of any entry strategy. It assumes every historical bar is a valid entry, which no real strategy does, and it does not account for spread on entry or slippage on the stop itself. - It tests one direction at a time (InpAssumeBuySide). A symbol with directional bias in the lookback window will show different survival rates for buys versus sells; run both if the difference matters to you. - Overlapping samples are not independent - adjacent bars share most of their forward window, so the sample count overstates how much genuinely new information the survival rate is built from. Treat it as indicative, not as a statistically rigorous estimate. - A stop distance below the broker's MODE_STOPLEVEL is flagged in the table but the row is still computed; a real order at that distance would be rejected by the server. - This is a read-only measurement tool. It does not place, modify or close any order.

Script · MT5 · v1.0 · Free

Tags: Trailing Stop & Break-even · Risk & Lot Size · Alerts · MT5 Script · MQL5 Source Code

MQL4 & MQL5 scripts · PolyMaria