Funny Andy should post about adding to winners, I've been playing around with MT4 for the last few months, exploring precisely this topic. As I've mentioned before, when I am waiting for 3 ducks setups to come along I tend to get bored and sometimes experiment with demo accounts to while away the hours in front of the screen.
I think adding to winners is a great way to improve your profit statistics. There is a golden rule though and that is that you should never open a new trade unless the previous one is in profit. If you succumb to the temptation of adding positions when previous trades are negative you are doing nothing more than averaging down losers and we all know how that eventually turns out. Play with the brokers money, not your own.
There is a screenshot of the product of my boredom below. It's an EA designed simply to add to winners, according to a number of criteria including our trusty 4hr 60 sma. Obviously this is taking things to an extreme (and it's on a demo account) but I hope it shows you the principle. Each red line is a sell order with its stop at breakeven. Green lines are sells with no stops set yet. 86% profit, and counting, with 2.3% max drawdown.
As I have said loads of times in this thread, when the market is paying out you have to take advantage and be aggressive. When the market is not paying out you should play defensive. Adding to winners is doing precisely that. You can turn a 100 pip move into 300 - 400 pips profit, using the same 20 pip stop, if you know what you are doing and are disciplined. The average 3 ducks trend often has a number of places which are valid entries to jump in. Keep the risk the same and stretch out the reward. Maths buffs tell me this isn't possible according to the laws of mathematics but I don't believe them :smart:
There were a lot of tricky market conditions for the first few months of the year and the pips weren't easy to come by. Since the beginning of May the market has been rewarding those of us that stuck around during the tricky periods by paying out handsomely. Take advantage of it while it lasts.
Good trading
Nigel