88 tests, 6 survivors: ready setups on built-in MT5 indicators, checked on unseen data

Most "ready settings" that come with an Expert Advisor are tuned on the same history they are shown on. Anything looks good on the data it was fitted to. For the ready setups of my Expert Advisor I wanted something a beginner can load in one click and see a small but honest plus - and I wanted to know that the plus is not just a fit to the past. This is how they were chosen, what failed, and what you can realistically expect from them.

The rules of the search

• Only indicators that come with MetaTrader 5 (MQL5\Indicators\Examples), so nothing has to be downloaded.
• 11 families of ideas: Alligator, Awesome Oscillator, Stochastic, MACD, Fractals, Heiken Ashi, Ichimoku, RSI, ADX, CCI and a crossover of two moving averages. Each one is an entry rule, an optional trend filter (the close above or below the EMA 200 on H4) and an exit: a stop loss as a multiple of the ATR, a take profit as a multiple of the stop, and what to do on an opposite signal.
• 4 markets (EURUSD, GBPUSD, USDJPY, XAUUSD) and 2 timeframes (H1, H4): 88 optimizations in the Strategy Tester, "1 minute OHLC" model, $10,000, risk 1% per trade.
• The optimizer saw only 2022-2024. The best settings were then run on 2025-2026, which the optimizer never saw.
• A setup was kept only if the same inputs, without any change, stayed profitable on the unseen 2025-2026 on several markets at once. The rating was the weakest of those results, not the best one.

What survived

Six setups, all on H4:

1. Alligator + EMA 200 trend - EURUSD, GBPUSD, USDJPY, XAUUSD.
2. Awesome Oscillator + EMA 200 trend - the same four markets.
3. Stochastic crossing inside the 40/60 zone + EMA 200 trend - the same four markets.
4. MACD + EMA 200 trend - the same four markets.
5. Fractals + EMA 200 trend - XAUUSD only.
6. Heiken Ashi colour change + trailing stop - EURUSD and GBPUSD only.

The picture shows every one of them on the whole period 2022-2026 with the product itself, not the research build: the same table you get if you run them in the Strategy Tester. All 19 combinations end the period with a profit: from +5.0% to +69.1% over the four years and nine months, and the largest drawdown of equity is 13.4%.

What did not survive

• RSI, ADX, CCI and the moving average crossover. Settings that looked good on 2022-2024 did not hold on the unseen 2025-2026 on several markets at once - exactly the trap the unseen period is there to catch.
• Ichimoku worked on the currency pairs and failed on gold, so it did not pass "several markets at once".
• Fractals on the currency pairs and Heiken Ashi on USDJPY - the same story, which is why those two setups are offered only for the markets where they held.
• Break-even and trailing stop on the Alligator setup. Both made the result worse: they cut the trades that make the profit of a trend-following system. The Heiken Ashi setup is the opposite case - it takes small moves, and the trailing stop helps it.

What to expect

These are not money machines. Most profit factors in the table are between 1.1 and 1.5, which means a small edge: many losing trades, fewer but larger winners, and months when the balance goes down. At 1% risk per trade that is about 1% to 12% a year, around 4-5% for a typical setup and market, with drawdowns of up to 13%. That is the honest size of what simple rules on built-in indicators can do, and it is the reason the default risk is 1%, not 5%.

What the setups are good for: seeing in five minutes how the program trades, having a working starting point instead of an empty inputs window, and learning what each part of a setup does by changing one thing at a time.

One thing found on the way: the lot on gold

During the search the gold results looked too volatile for 1% risk. The reason: the demo server reported a tick value for XAUUSD that was ten times too small, so a lot calculated "for 1% risk" from it actually risked about 10%. Many Expert Advisors calculate the lot exactly that way. Since version 1.08 the loss at the stop is calculated with the server's own profit formula (OrderCalcProfit), and the tick value is only a fallback; in the tester the loss per stop on gold is now 0.6-1.0% of the balance at 1% risk.

How to try it

The free demo of Indicator Signal Trader Kb runs in the Strategy Tester. Choose the Expert Advisor, a symbol and any timeframe (the setups read H4 themselves), and in the first line of the inputs, Ready setup, pick one of the six. Press Start. To use your own indicator instead, choose Custom - the setups are a starting point, the program is built to trade any indicator.