Discussing the article: "Weibull Reliability Analysis for Strategy Lifespan: Estimating When an EA Is Likely to "Fail""

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Check out the new article: Weibull Reliability Analysis for Strategy Lifespan: Estimating When an EA Is Likely to "Fail".

We implement a native Weibull maximum-likelihood fit in MQL5 and use it to model strategy wear-out from trade history. Failures are defined as the rolling profit factor dropping below a floor, producing lifetimes in trades. The article wires a survival-based governor into an EA and a companion indicator, so you can estimate conditional survival over the next N trades and apply explicit retirement thresholds with cooldown.

Most EAs die from something quieter than a blown stop loss. The parameter set that worked for eight months starts giving back a little more each week, the equity curve flattens, and by the time anyone notices the profit factor has been below 1 for a month. The question this article answers is a mechanical one: given the trades a strategy has already survived, what is the probability it survives the next N trades before its performance crosses a floor you define?

A note on scope before diving in: this is an implementation article and a single-instrument case study - it shows how to build a native Weibull reliability layer in MQL5 and what one real backtest produced. It is not a validation study proving the approach improves trading results; that distinction matters enough to flag upfront, and the "What this does and doesn't prove" section further down covers it in full.

That is exactly the question reliability engineering asks about hardware, the "how long until this part wears out" question, and the tool built for it is the Weibull distribution. We are not borrowing the name for flavor; we implement the actual maximum-likelihood estimator natively in MQL5, wrap it in a class, and hang a small governor off an ordinary EA that watches its own rolling performance and asks the fitted model for a survival probability before every new trade.

Three files come out of this: WeibullReliability_Core.mqh (the fitter and the reliability/hazard math), WeibullReliability_EA.mq5 (a plain EMA-cross system carrying the governor), and WeibullReliability_Ind.mq5 (a subwindow indicator that plots the live R(t) and h(t) curves). The code is the point of this article, so most sections below lead with a snippet and explain it inline rather than describing it first in prose and showing it after.

Author: Adewumi Babatunde Gbadebo