Strategies

Trend-following EAs enter in the direction of an established move and stay in while it lasts. The entry decides when they trade; the exit decides what the record looks like. In the Builder's own stock-settings baseline, the same entry scored 0.97 with a fixed stop and target and 0.65 with a trailing-stop exit package.

Scalping names a holding time, not an entry idea, and the chart period does not set it — the exit distance does. What decides a scalper is the cost it must clear on every trade: at a 15-pip stop and 20-pip target, each pip of round-trip cost adds 2.9 points to the win rate needed to break even.

Grid EAs open orders at regular price intervals, building a mesh of buy and sell entries that profits from oscillation. Capital-intensive; requires careful drawdown management to survive trending regimes.

Martingale EAs double position size after each loss so that one winner repays the whole run. A cycle ends on a win, so a near-perfect win rate is built in before any market is involved. The arithmetic decides the rest: with a 30-pip stop and target, a four-step cap and a 2-pip cost, the winner after a run of four losses does not repay it.

Arbitrage EAs exploit temporary price discrepancies between related instruments. Latency-sensitive and broker-dependent. Retail variants use statistical correlation rather than pure cross-exchange arbitrage.

News EAs trade the volatility spike around scheduled economic releases — a straddle before the event, or a blackout filter that suppresses entries around it. High variance and brutally spread-sensitive; a Raw/ECN account is mandatory for the straddle variant.

Mean-reversion EAs enter against a move once price has stretched a measured distance from its average, and target the return. The label names the entry only. In the Builder's recorded search, twelve stop-and-target settings on each of the RSI and Bollinger reversal templates never cleared a 1.0 profit factor, even in-sample.

Breakout EAs enter when price exits a defined consolidation range or key level with momentum confirmation. They position earlier than crossover trend entries but are exposed to false breakouts in low-volatility markets. In the Builder's baseline, the pending-stop template scored 1.23 against 1.05 for the market-order one.