I am new to tradestation and to easy language and I am trying to set up some stops in my strategy. What I would like to have happen is for a stop to be set when I enter a trade as a stop loss then if a trade begins to show a profit I want to change this to a percent trailing stop that tightens as the profit increases. I am sure it has something to do with the way the language executes the code but I can't figure it out how to do it. Do I need some sort of If statement?

When I do this the only thing that seems to happen is the stop loss: I was expecting that the stops would override the previous ones as they became valid but that is not the case when I backtest it. I truly appreciate any help anyone can provide as I'm sure I'm probably going about this the wrong way.

SetStopPosition;
SetStopLoss(1000);
SetPercentTrailing((tradecost*.03),15);
SetPercentTrailing((tradecost*.06),10);
SetPercentTrailing((tradecost*.09),5);

bfiselin,

I don't think more than one SetPercentTrailing reserved word can actually be active in the code. What might work is changing the amounts or percentages when certain conditions trigger.

Regards,
ABCTG

I think the first number is the floor price for starting the stop. I would think you would want it to be slightly higher than the entry price.

So instead of "SetPercentTrailing((tradecost*.03),15);" you might want to set the floor price to 3% above the entry price. That would be "SetPercentTrailing((tradecost*1.03),15);" The 1.03 makes your floor price 3% above entry.

If it is helpful, I have included in addition to the StopLoss that can be optimized, a ProfitTarget based on volatility (ATR)
and with a percentage retracement, so:
activates the stop (ProfitTarget) if, after the profit of 1.5 times the ATR is reached, the Market goes back 20%.

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Inputs: Amount(1000);


value1=AvgTrueRange(10);
value2=value1*1.5;

SetStopLoss(Amount);
SetPercentTrailing(value2,20);

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If you also want to optimize the percentage retracement value, the formula becomes like this:


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Inputs: Amount(1000), n1(20);


value1=AvgTrueRange(10);
value2=value1*1.5;

SetStopLoss(Amount);
SetPercentTrailing(value2,n1);

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