GoldLondonBreakout - expert for MetaTrader 5

Gold London Breakout EA

The idea behind it

Gold has a well-worn behavioural pattern: it tends to compress during the Asian session and then expand hard once London desks come online. This EA does not predict that expansion — it measures the Asian range for the day, then places a pending BuyStop just above it and a pending SellStop just below it, so whichever direction the market actually breaks is the one that gets traded. The two orders are OCO (one-cancels-other): the moment either one fills, the EA cancels its twin, so you are never carrying both sides at once.

Symbol and timeframe matter more here than in most EAs, because the whole idea depends on the instrument actually having this session-compression behaviour: it is written and intended for XAUUSD (Gold), on a M15 chart. M15 is recommended specifically because the hour-boundary checks that lock in the range and open the trading window need enough resolution to catch the transition cleanly without processing every single tick.

How to interpret it

• The Asian range window — from InpAsianStartHour to InpAsianEndHour, server time. The EA watches every bar in that window and records the session high and low the moment the window closes.
• The range filter — the Asian range is compared against the symbol's own daily ATR rather than a fixed point count, so the filter self-calibrates to whatever price level and volatility regime the instrument is currently in instead of needing manual recalibration every time gold (or any symbol) moves to a new price range. If the session range comes in below InpMinRangeATRFrac or above InpMaxRangeATRFrac of daily ATR, the EA sits out for the day. A range that tight usually means a dead session with no real breakout to trade; a range that wide usually means the compression the strategy depends on never happened.
• The breakout orders — placed once the clock reaches InpLondonStartHour, sitting a small ATR-scaled buffer outside the locked range. Stops and targets are set from ATR at the moment of placement, not from the range width, so trade risk stays consistent regardless of how wide or narrow that day's range was.
• The expiry — if neither pending order has triggered by InpLondonEndHour, both are cancelled. The strategy only wants the breakout while London is actually opening; a move that starts hours later is a different setup entirely.

External variables (inputs)

Recommended use

Built for XAUUSD on M15. It will compile and run on other symbols and timeframes, but the whole premise — Asian compression, London expansion — is a gold-specific pattern, so results elsewhere should not be expected to carry the same logic. Check your broker's server time against London's actual opening hour before trusting the default session inputs; server time offsets vary by broker and by daylight-saving changes on each side.

One account-type note worth flagging honestly: this was written assuming a hedging-enabled account, where the EA's own position is unambiguous. On a netting account, if another position already exists on the same symbol when a breakout order fills, MetaTrader nets it into the existing position rather than opening a separate one, which can affect how cleanly the EA's own magic-number tracking reflects what is actually open. If you run a netting account, keep this EA on a symbol nothing else is trading.

Fig. 1. The Asian range lock-in, followed by the OCO BuyStop/SellStop pair around it at the London open. Rendered in black and white per the Code Base image guidelines.