Exponential Martingale

The pure doubling curve, and the reason grid trading has the reputation it has. Every level doubles the commitment, so the average entry collapses toward the deepest fill and a tiny bounce recovers everything — right up until the level where the account cannot fund the next rung, at which point nothing recovers at all. It is included for completeness and for the small set of situations where a hard level cap plus a stop makes its tail finite.

Size at level i is 2^i base lots. Level 10 alone is 1024× base and the cumulative ladder is roughly 2046× base. The doubling is unbounded: there is no ceiling in the formula, so the only bound is the level count you configure and the capital you actually have.

Below is the wizard's own ladder table and the trading terminal's chart engine, both driven by buildLadderPlan for this mode. Change the level count, spread or target and the rung prices, sizes, capital ramp and chart lines recompute exactly as they would in the grid designer.

Cost roughly doubles with every level added, so capital planning is dominated by the last two rungs — they are more than half the ladder between them. This also means the marginal coverage bought by one more level is the most expensive purchase in the catalog.

Read the cost vs 5 levels column as the escalation test. A flat ladder doubles when the depth doubles; anything materially above that is a curve whose coverage has to be bought rather than simply configured.

With every rung filled, the volume-weighted average entry is 90.99 against a base of 100 and a deepest rung of 90.00 — so the average sits 90% of the way down the covered range. Getting back to flat from the bottom therefore needs a 1.10% bounce, against 5.00% for a flat ladder of the same depth — 3.90% less work.

Position doubles every level. The average entry collapses toward the deepest fill, so a very small bounce clears the whole ladder — but level 10 alone is 1024× base and the cumulative cost is about 2046× base.

The last row is the metric that separates modes. Profit for a full cycle is the target percentage of deployed capital in every mode, so it cannot discriminate. What differs is how much capital has to sit reserved to earn one shallow cycle: this mode reserves 2046× base to collect 0.1 bps of it when the first rung completes.

Sharp, reliable mean reversion on an instrument you are actively supervising, with a level cap chosen so the full ladder is genuinely fundable. There is no regime in which unbounded doubling is safe to leave unattended.

Position DOUBLES every level. Averages down extremely fast so a small bounce recovers the whole ladder, but capital explodes: level 10 is 1024× base. A prolonged trend against you will exhaust the account.

Convex and unforgiving. The failure is not "a large loss" but a structural one: the ladder demands an order the account cannot place, so the averaging stops exactly when it was supposed to matter, leaving a maximal position with no mechanism behind it. Leverage compounds this by bringing liquidation inside the covered range.

This is the product's grid backtester, not a summary of one. It fetches public candles for the instrument you pick, rebuilds the ladder anchored on the first candle of the window, then applies the engine's own fill, take-profit, refill and stop-loss rules bar by bar. The caveat block inside the panel is part of the output — read it before trusting a number.

First the arithmetic, then the market. The table below is computed from the size curves alone; the sweep underneath replays every one of those ladders over the same real candle window, with grid_mode as the only variable.

• Only with a hard level cap, an armed stop loss, and reserves well beyond the nominal requirement.
• High-conviction reversal setups under active human supervision.
• As a teaching instrument: run it in the backtester on a trending window to see the mechanism fail.

• Unattended operation of any kind.
• Any instrument capable of trending — which is all of them.
• Leverage above 1×, where liquidation arrives before the ladder finishes.

• If you want this recovery profile with a survivable tail, use capped martingale: it doubles to a ceiling and then holds flat.
• Every level you remove halves the worst case. Depth is the only meaningful dial here.
• Arm the stop loss and set it inside the range your capital actually covers, not at the bottom of the configured ladder.

• Compute the fundable depth before deploying, then set levels to that number — not to the depth you wish you had.
• Alert on the deepest filled level crossing half the configured depth; from there the remaining ladder costs as much as everything before it.
• Watch the deepest filled level, not the P&L. Depth is the leading indicator; P&L is the lagging one.
• Compare peak committed notional against the account, weekly. A growth curve that has never been deep has never been tested.
• Treat every level increase as a capital decision: adding levels to a growth curve is not a linear cost.

1. 1
   Funding wall

   The next rung is larger than the free margin, so it is rejected. The ladder silently stops averaging at the worst possible moment while the operator still believes the plan is intact.
2. 2
   Liquidation inside coverage

   With leverage, the position's liquidation price can sit above the deepest rung. The grid is then mathematically incapable of completing its own plan.
3. 3
   Survivorship reading

   A backtest window without a sustained trend shows exponential outperforming everything, because the tail never happened. This is the single most common way operators talk themselves into it.

• Never pair with trailing: shifting a doubling ladder re-places the heaviest orders at new prices and multiplies the exposure event.
• Pair with the tightest workable target — the whole thesis depends on booking the bounce quickly.
• Spread sets how fast the ladder consumes depth. Widening it buys coverage for the same level count at the cost of fewer fills.
• Target sets what each cycle books. Below round-trip fees plus slippage, a grid is a fee generator regardless of the size curve.
• The stop loss is the only bound on the tail. Without it, the curve's worst case is whatever the market does, not what you planned.

1. 1
   Is there any configuration where this is defensible?

   A short ladder (4–6 levels), 1× leverage, an armed stop, and capital sized for the full curve. At that point you have built something close to capped martingale, which is the better-behaved way to get there.
2. 2
   Why is it in the catalog at all?

   Because the engine mirrors the C++ mode table exactly, and because seeing the curve measured against its alternatives is the most effective argument against using it.

• Sizes and capital: levelMultiplier / gridModeCurve in lib/grid/gridModes.ts, mirrored from grid_modes.hpp and the Python engine's lot calculator.
• Rung and exit prices, capital ramp, init targets and the stop line: buildLadderPlan — the same builder the wizard and grid designer use.
• Backtest fills, cycles and P&L: runBacktest / runBacktestSweep over public broker candles, applying the engine's fill, exit, refill and stop rules.
• Price charts: the trading terminal's chart engine, with the ladder drawn through its own price-line API.

• 1.Grid Modes — Overview — The full taxonomy and how to choose
• 2.Martingale family — What every curve in this family has in common
• 3.Capital Allocation — Sizing an account to a Exponential Martingale ladder
• 4.Stop Loss — Bounding this curve's tail
• 5.Reading the Ladder Plan — Verifying the curve before deploying
• 6.Grid Structure — Levels, init batch and base size