Hard Targets

With USE_HARD_TARGETS=true, SL/TP become fixed distances (pips × PIP_SIZE) and are sent to mt5-trader as stop_loss_distance / take_profit_distance rather than as absolute price levels.

Why distances matter

This service evaluates on a bar close, and MT5 bars are bid-based, while a market buy fills at the ask. Anchoring absolute levels here would add the spread to every long’s risk and subtract it from the reward.

Example on XAUUSD at a $0.30 spread: a nominal 25-pip / 40-pip pair (1.60 R:R) actually executes as $2.80 / $3.70 — an R:R of 1.32. Sells were unaffected, so the distortion was directional.

Sending distances lets mt5-trader measure from the price the order actually fills at, which also removes the error from price drift during POLL_INTERVAL_SECONDS.

Mode	SL/TP form	When to use
Supertrend (default)	Absolute prices	Stop sits on the Supertrend line
Hard targets	Distances (`*_distance`)	Fixed pip risk; avoid bid/ask skew

`PIP_SIZE` must be set explicitly

PIP_SIZE is the price movement of one pip. It is deliberately not derived from PRICE_DIGITS — that conflates the pip convention with quote precision, and the two are independent. A broker quoting XAUUSD to 3 decimals instead of 2 would otherwise rescale every stop by 10× with no config change and no warning.

Always set PIP_SIZE explicitly. Leaving it unset falls back to the legacy 10^-(PRICE_DIGITS-1) derivation for backward compatibility only.

Calibration (gold example)

Gold has no agreed pip convention, so PIP_SIZE is calibrated from a chart measurement. The shipped default comes from:


XAUUSD short: 4046.607 -> 4042.579 = 4.028 price move = 40.28 pips
  => PIP_SIZE = 4.028 / 40.28 = 0.10

On that scale 1 pip is $0.10 of gold, so:

Setting	Meaning
`STOP_LOSS_PIPS=25`	$2.50 stop
`TAKE_PROFIT_PIPS=40`	$4.00 target

To re-calibrate for another instrument or platform:


PIP_SIZE = price_move / reported_pips

Chart vs MT5 for calibration

Calibrating on a TradingView chart while executing on the MT5 feed is sound. PIP_SIZE is a unit conversion, and both feeds quote XAUUSD in USD per ounce — so “1 pip = $0.10 of gold” is true on either. Price levels are what differ between feeds; that is exactly why hard targets travel as distances and are resolved against the MT5 fill.

PRICE_DIGITS, by contrast, describes the feed you execute on — read it from mt5-trader’s GET /v1/market-data/tick rather than from a TradingView quote.

Variable	Purpose
`USE_HARD_TARGETS`	Enable fixed-distance exits
`STOP_LOSS_PIPS` / `TAKE_PROFIT_PIPS`	Pip distances (overridable per instrument in `SYMBOLS_FILE`)
`PIP_SIZE`	Price per pip (overridable per instrument as `pip_size`)
`PRICE_DIGITS`	Quote precision on the execution feed