Show the ask line, because your short stops trigger on it

[Fairman]

Show the ask line, because your short stops trigger on it

MT4 and MT5 draw candles from the bid. That's fine until you have a short position, because a short's stop loss is a buy order and it triggers when the ask reaches the stop price, not the bid.

Example: EURUSD bid 1.08200, ask 1.08212, spread 1.2 pips. You're short with a stop at 1.08300. The bid only needs to reach 1.08288 for the ask to be at 1.08300 and trigger the stop. On the chart, the candle high is 1.08288, and it looks like the stop was hit 1.2 pips early.

Worse, around rollover or news, the spread can widen to 3 or 5 pips for a few seconds. The bid barely moves, but the ask spikes up, and your stop is hit with no bid candle anywhere near it. People often blame the broker for stop hunting when this happens.

The fix is simple: in MT5, open chart properties with F8, go to the Show tab, and tick Show Ask price line. In MT4 it's in the same place, under Common, Show Ask line. You'll then see the ask as a second line moving with the bid.

It won't show past ask prices on the candles, only the current line. For historical ask highs, you need tick data or a separate ask chart.

For long positions the opposite applies. A long's take profit is a sell, triggered by the bid, so it fills exactly as the chart shows.

[FXS HongKong Scalper]

Some platforms, including TradingView, let you show both bid and ask lines on the chart, which helps with planning short stops. In MT4 and MT5 the ask line can be turned on in the chart properties. For short trades through rollover or news, placing the stop a little wider to allow for the spread spike, and reducing size to keep the same risk, avoids many early stop outs. Checking the spread history at the time of a stop out also shows whether the spread was the cause.

[Fairman]

Some platforms like cTrader let you show both bid and ask on the chart, and a few can draw ask candles. If you mostly trade shorts, having an ask chart open side by side shows you exactly where stops would have triggered historically. On MT5 you can approximate this by adding a custom symbol built from ask prices, though it takes some setup. cTrader's chart settings also let you colour the ask line differently from the bid, so it's easy to see at a glance. For someone moving from MT5, this is one of the more useful differences. It takes the guesswork out of short stop placement.

[Fairman]

Pending orders have the same issue. A sell limit at 1.08300 fills when the bid reaches 1.08300. A buy limit fills when the ask reaches its price. If you place a buy limit at a support level drawn from the bid chart, you need the ask to get there, which requires the bid to go a full spread lower. That's one reason buy limits at exact levels miss more often than sell limits. Sell limits are the reverse: they fill when the bid reaches the price, which matches the chart. So sell limits at resistance drawn on the bid chart fill as you'd expect, while buy limits at support need the extra spread. Knowing this explains a lot of missed fills on the long side.

[Fairman]

For EAs, the same logic applies in code. Stops for shorts should be compared with the ask, and for longs with the bid. Some homemade EAs that manage stops by watching the bid on every tick make mistakes on shorts. Using the platform's own stop orders avoids that, since the server handles the trigger logic correctly. A common bug is a trailing stop for shorts that checks the bid against the stop price and closes the trade with a market order. During a spread spike the bid hasn't moved, so the EA doesn't close, but a server stop at the same price would have been hit by the ask. Or the reverse, depending on how it's written. Server stops behave consistently.

[Fairman]

When reviewing trades, a quick check of the spread at the time of the stop tells you whether it was a real move or a spread spike. If the bid high was 1.08288 and the stop was 1.08300 with a 1.2 pip spread, it was a normal trigger. If the bid high was 1.08260 and the stop still filled, the spread must have widened to 4 pips. Those are different problems and need different fixes. Logging the spread at the time of each stop fill makes this check fast. Over a month, if many stops are triggered by spread rather than price, the stop placement needs more room or the trading hours need to change.