Giskard Trade Assistant — installation and first run
This post takes you from the Market page to a panel on your chart and your first planned trade. It is written for someone who has never installed a product from the MQL5 Market. The full manual is in a separate post; this one only covers getting started.
1. Before you buy: the two kinds of demo
The Free demo button on the product page gives you the panel inside MT5's Strategy Tester only. That is how the Market works for every product: you can watch the panel trade its rules on past prices, but it will not appear on a live chart.
If you want the panel on a live demo-account chart, with the buttons under your mouse, there is a separate 30-day demo-account build. It is a different file, it runs on demo accounts only, and it is described in its own post. Most people try that one first.
2. Sign in to your MQL5 account in the terminal
The Market delivers products to a terminal that is signed in to the MQL5 account that bought them. In MT5 open Tools → Options → Community, enter your MQL5.com login and password, press OK. The Toolbox window's Market tab now shows your purchases under Purchased.
If you use more than one terminal (a second broker, a VPS), sign in on each. Every terminal counts as one activation; see §6.
3. Buy or rent, then find it in the Navigator
On the product page choose Buy or one of the rental periods, confirm, and wait a few seconds. In MT5 press Ctrl+N to open the Navigator, expand Expert Advisors, then Market. Giskard Trade Assistant is there. There is nothing to compile and nothing to copy into folders.
If it does not appear: in the Toolbox's Market tab, under Purchased, press Install next to the product; if the tab is empty, you are signed in with a different MQL5 account than the one that bought it.
4. Put it on a chart
- Open a chart of the symbol you trade. The panel was built on XAUUSD but runs on any symbol. Any timeframe works; start with the one you normally look at.
- Drag Giskard Trade Assistant from the Navigator onto the chart. A properties window opens. On the Common tab, Allow Algo Trading must be ticked. Press OK for the defaults on the other tabs.
- Look at the Algo Trading button in MT5's toolbar. It must be green. If it is red, click it once. While it is red the panel shows everything but refuses to trade, and its status band reads BLOCKED.
The panel appears at the top-left of the chart with the caption GTA - XAUUSD M5 (your symbol and timeframe). Drag it by the caption to move it; the two small buttons on the caption minimise or close it. One panel per chart; a second copy on the same symbol refuses to start and says why in the Experts tab.
5. The first five minutes
Read the status band. On most charts, most of the time, it reads WAIT with a line such as 3 of 5 rules pass - no setup . That is normal: READY only shows while all five rules are true on the last closed candle, which happens a few times a day on a fast chart and much less on a slow one. The RULES rows under the band tell you which rule is missing.
Set your risk. Open the SETTINGS tab. The Risk field is the percentage of your equity one losing trade may cost; the default is 1. Type your number, press APPLY. The Size row on the TRADE tab recalculates at once. Every setting on this tab is remembered per symbol.
Plan a trade without sending it. Open the PLAN tab and press PLAN LONG. A box appears on the chart: green above the entry (your potential gain), pink below it (your potential loss), with three bars that show the stop, the entry and the target in points, money and percent of equity. Press on a bar and drag it; the numbers follow. Press CLEAR when you have seen enough. Nothing has been sent to the broker.
Place a real one when you are ready. On the TRADE tab, BUY and SELL send a market order with the stop and target already attached, at the size the panel calculated. On the PLAN tab, OPEN does the same for the box as you drew it, and PLACE sends it as a pending order if you dragged the entry away from the price. Either way the trade shows up in the panel's position block and in MT5's own Trade tab like any other trade.
6. Activations
A Market product is bound to the terminals it is installed on. Each new terminal or computer uses one activation; reinstalling MT5 on the same machine normally does not. The number of activations is shown on the product page. Keep a note of which machines you have used; if you run out, write in the product's Comments tab with your MQL5 login and the dates.
7. If something does not look right
The panel writes everything it does, and every reason it refuses something, to MT5's Experts tab (Toolbox window, bottom of the screen). Read that first. The troubleshooting post covers the common cases: the band says BLOCKED, "no indicator data yet", the broker widened a stop, a pending order stayed behind after the panel was removed, the session rule and server time.
Questions go in the product's Comments tab, in English or Spanish.
This is a tool, not a promise. It does not guarantee any winnings; it makes trading easier to navigate by sizing, placing and managing your trades the way you set it up. Every decision to trade, and every result of it, remains yours.
