CC Cent

Cash Cow Cent: Milk it daily. It won't live forever.

Most grid EAs pretend they will run forever. Cash Cow Cent doesn't. It is an aggressive martingale grid for XAUUSD that collects small basket profits over and over, all day long. Like every martingale, one bad enough move can take the whole account.

That's why the rule is simple: withdraw your profit every day. Run it on a cent account with money you can afford to lose, take out what it earns, and let the cow keep producing. When the day comes that it doesn't survive, the money you've already withdrawn is yours.

User manual: Cash Cow Cent User Manual (free PDF). Setup, every input explained, simulations, backtesting and troubleshooting.

Quick Facts

• Symbol: XAUUSD (Gold)
• Timeframe: attach to any chart timeframe. The EA works on M1 internally by default.
• Direction: buy only by default. Can be switched to sell only or both directions.
• Account: cent (USC), hedging (netting accounts are not supported), ECN / RAW spread recommended
• Leverage: 1:500 or higher
• Minimum deposit: 10,000 USC ($100). Below this the EA opens no new baskets (open baskets are still managed). Always leave at least 10,000 in the account after withdrawing.
• Starting lot: 0.02 fixed by default. Optional auto lot scales it with your balance (0.02 per 10,000 USC for buy baskets, per 20,000 USC for sell baskets)
• Trading hours: automatic, from 3 hours after gold's daily open to 4 hours before its close. The same for every trader in every timezone.
• VPS: strongly recommended

How It Works

1. Cash Cow Cent opens a first position in the chosen direction.
2. If price moves against it, the EA adds a larger layer. The spacing follows current volatility (ATR): wider in fast markets, tighter in quiet ones.
3. Each new layer pulls the basket's average price closer to the market.
4. A small retracement is then enough to reach the basket's take profit, set at a distance from its average price. The spread is already paid when each position opens, and the target adds your broker's real commission, so a "90-point TP" is 90 points of real profit on ECN accounts, not 90 points minus costs.
5. The whole basket closes together in profit, and the cycle starts again.

Your starting lot is not your maximum exposure. A basket that starts at 0.02 lots holds about 4 lots by layer 10, 200 times the first position.

Features

Protection and filters

• News filter: blocks new baskets around high-impact US releases, using both the MT5 calendar and the ForexFactory calendar: an event is blocked when either source rates it high-impact. The panel shows the next or current block, where the data came from and when trading resumes.
• Trading hours tied to the market: they follow gold's own session as published by your broker, including daylight-saving shifts.
• Minimum-balance guard: no new baskets below 10,000 USC.
• Emergency exit before stop-out: if the margin level falls to 1.5 times your broker's stop-out level, the EA closes its baskets itself instead of letting the broker liquidate the account position by position. The loss is still real; this only decides who closes.
• Broker-side failsafe TP: a real TP is placed on the broker's server as a backup if your terminal or VPS disconnects.
• Optional: basket stop loss, drawdown protection, and blackout hours for advanced users.

Visibility

• Clean dashboard with a cow theme: balance, equity, today's and this week's profit, the broker's stop-out and margin call levels with a GOOD / FAIR / HIGH rating of the stop-out, recent results for yesterday, last week, this month and all time, one card per basket, trading status and the upcoming news, with a scrollable list of every news block this week. The chart's own colours are restored when you remove the EA.
• Liquidation price: see the price at which this basket would hit stop-out, and how far price is from it.
• Panel buttons: pause new baskets with one click, close a basket with a two-step confirmation, and resize the panel with A- / A+.
• Mobile TP display: a special pending order shows layers, floating profit and liquidation price in the MT5 mobile app, e.g. "L:7 | P:+1638.00 | Liq:4210.55".

Reliability

• State recovery: after a terminal restart or EA reattach the EA carries on where it left off. On a new VPS it rebuilds the basket from your open positions.
• Gold quote detection: broker points are detected automatically for 2- and 3-digit gold quotes.
• Multiple instances: run several charts on one terminal, each with its own magic number.

Free Companion Tools

• Monitor for CC Cent (free on the Market): a read-only dashboard in the same cow theme for a second terminal, laptop or VPS. It reads the EA's settings automatically and shows balance, profit, each basket, liquidation price, direction mode and trading hours. It never opens, closes or modifies trades.
• Notifier for CC Cent (free on the Market): a Telegram message on your phone every time a basket closes, plus an optional daily and weekly profit summary. It is read-only and never opens, closes or modifies trades.
• Cash Cow Cent News Export: optional. It saves the MT5 calendar to a file for backtesting with the very latest news dates.

How to get them: download the Monitor and the Notifier free from their Market pages, linked above. For the News Export, send a private message on MQL5 after purchase.

Setup

1. Open a cent, hedging, ECN/RAW account with 1:500 leverage and at least 10,000 USC.
2. Attach Cash Cow Cent to an XAUUSD chart. Any timeframe works.
3. Allow WebRequest for nfs.faireconomy.media (Tools > Options > Expert Advisors).
4. Keep the default settings.
5. Withdraw profit daily, leaving at least 10,000 USC in the account.
6. Running more than one chart? Give each its own magic number (group 01), at least 10 apart (e.g. 888888, 888898).

Use the Default Settings

The default settings are the tested configuration. The starting lot, grid spacing, trading hours, news blocking and the minimum-balance guard are tuned together to reduce the risk of a stop-out. They lower that risk; they don't remove it.

Every setting can be changed, but changing lot size, multiplier or grid distance can greatly increase the risk of blowing the account. If you're unsure, leave them at their defaults.

Settings you may need (the first five are in group 01, Key Settings)

• Operating mode: Buy only by default. Sell only, On (buy and sell) and Off are also available. Close only stops new baskets but keeps managing the open ones, so you can pause the EA without leaving a basket unmanaged. In Off mode an open basket still keeps its take profit and safety exits.
• Magic number: 888888 by default. Change it only when running more than one chart (see Setup).
• Auto lot: off by default. Turn it on to scale the first lot with your balance.
• Emergency exit before the broker's stop-out: on by default.
• News filter: on by default. Blocks new baskets around high-impact US news.
• Backtest settings: the news simulation (group 09) and the broker server offset and DST rule (group 16) only affect the Strategy Tester. See About Backtesting.

About Backtesting (please read)

News in the Strategy Tester. MT5 gives EAs no access to the economic calendar during a backtest. Without special handling, a backtest would run with no news filter at all, which is very different from live trading. In testing, one unfiltered news release was the difference between a strong result and a blown account.

To keep backtests honest, Cash Cow Cent has past US high-impact release dates built in (2021 to 2026), and uses them to simulate the news filter in the tester. This is on by default ("Backtest: simulate news using built-in release dates", group 09). You can switch it off to see what happens without a news filter. Live trading always uses the real calendar. The built-in list is every high-impact USD event in the MT5 economic calendar from 4 January 2021 to 23 December 2026 (2,997 releases), selected by one rule. No date was added or removed by hand.

The "Broker server offset from GMT, in hours" and "Server DST rule" settings (group 16) are used in the Strategy Tester only. If your broker's server is not on GMT+3 all year, set them to your broker's server time so the simulated news windows and trading hours line up with the real times. Live trading ignores them.

Test 2026 data. Cash Cow Cent is tuned for gold's 2026 market behaviour: its price level, volatility and spread conditions. Older periods had very different conditions, and backtests before 2026 are not expected to perform well. That reflects how the EA is built, not a fault. The built-in news dates start in January 2021.

Reading results:

• Grid EAs produce smooth-looking curves right up until they don't. Look at the drawdown, not the profit.
• Auto lot compounds, which makes profits look enormous. Test with a fixed lot to see the real per-basket behaviour.
• Use real ticks and your broker's own spread and commission.

Read This Before You Buy

This is not a safe EA, and it doesn't pretend to be.

• Cash Cow Cent is a martingale grid. Lot size grows with every layer. A strong one-directional move can open many layers and lose the entire account in a single basket.
• It is designed for cent accounts and money you can afford to lose completely.
• The strategy only makes sense with regular withdrawals. Profit left in the account is profit at risk.
• Past performance, backtests included, does not guarantee future results. Trading leveraged CFDs carries a high risk of losing all of your capital.

Not for: standard (non-cent) accounts, netting accounts, anyone who won't withdraw, or anyone planning to raise the starting lot.