Placing The Order Before Price Reaches The Level: How Ridgeline Works

Most breakout robots behave the same way. Price passes a level, the move confirms, the robot enters. By then the first part of the move is gone and the entry sits well away from the level itself. Ridgeline makes the opposite decision. It finds the level first and puts the order in front of it, so the fill happens while price is still travelling toward the level rather than after the move has started. Everything else in the design follows from that one choice. The level the market has left alone Each set of rules reads daily bars on XAUUSD, hunting one specific thing: a high that no later bar has taken out, and that also stands above the bars immediately before it. Support is the mirror image, a low that nothing after it has broken. These are the prices where the market turned and never came back. Once price has passed a level it is not a level any more, and the search moves on. Distance matters too. If the nearest untouched level sits close to where the market is trading, the set waits instead of putting an order at a price the market is already sitting on. The order goes in before price arrives The entry is a pending stop order placed at a fixed offset from the level, on the near side of it. A buy stop sits slightly below a resistance, not above it. Price arrives to find the order already waiting, and the fill happens on the approach. Stop loss and target are attached at the moment the order is placed, not after it fills, so the position carries both of them from its first tick. Protection never waits on the terminal being awake at that second. Pending orders expire. A level that price has not reached inside the set's window is no longer the same level, so the order is withdrawn and the search starts again on current data. Seven sets looking at different depths Ridgeline runs seven independent sets of rules. They differ in how far back through daily history they look for a level and how far from it the order sits, in how long that order waits, in the size of the stop, the target and the trailing stop. While one set waits at a level formed last week, another watches one from three months back. Each set carries its own magic number and handles only its own orders and positions. No set ever adds to a position opened by another. A trade that goes against the set is closed by its stop at the distance fixed when the order was placed, without averaging and without any increase in volume. Standing down after a loss Take a loss and the set stops placing orders for two days, pulling its own pending orders off the chart. A level that has just failed in choppy conditions tends to behave the same way on the next attempt, so the set steps aside and lets the conditions move on. The other six are untouched and keep working. The length of the pause is an input. Distances scaled to the price of gold A stop measured as a fixed number of dollars means one thing when gold is cheap and something quite different when it is expensive. Ridgeline measures every distance against a reference price and scales it with the market, so the offset to the level, the stop and the target hold their proportion as price moves through the years. The reference price is an input, and the scaling can be switched off. Numbers from the run Strategy Tester, XAUUSD, 2019.06.01 to 2026.09.11, 1 minute OHLC model, history quality 99%, starting deposit 1000, fixed minimum volume. Net result 6209.86. Gross positive divided by gross negative, 2.75. Largest balance drawdown 9.67%, largest equity drawdown 12.60%. 1200 trades, 62.67% of them closed positive. Recovery factor 14.35. Where the account size comes from The volume behind those figures is the fixed minimum. The product also ships risk profiles that derive volume from the balance; the profile is a single input and applies to all seven sets alike. What you size an account by is concurrent exposure. Because the seven sets read the same instrument, several of them can settle on the same area and work orders around it at the same time. Across the window the portfolio held as many as 17 positions at once, which is 0.17 lots in total at the minimum volume. Margin and free equity are sized against that number rather than against the stop on any single trade, and the account requirement is built from that arithmetic. Ridgeline is on the Market as an expert advisor for MetaTrader 5 at 50 USD, on a hedging account, on any chart timeframe, since the sets read daily bars themselves. Download the demo from the product page and run it in the Strategy Tester. Load it on XAUUSD with the inputs as they ship and watch where the pending orders appear relative to the untouched daily levels. Everything described above is visible on the chart, order by order.