Gianluca Gangemi / Profile

Gold has a daily maintenance break on the CME. The first hour after it rises more than chance explains, in every calendar year of an 11-year sample - while every other hour of the day measures flat. One trade per session, a volatility-scaled server-side stop, no averaging or grid. Then my cost model turned out to be wrong. A real-tick backtest showed the true round-trip cost at the reopen is about 60 points, not the 19 my research had charged - the M1 bar spread field is a per-bar summary and understates it roughly threefold. Re-running 11 years at the corrected cost: +3.34 bps, t 7.40, 59.3% wins -> +1.60 bps, t 3.42, 50.8% wins The edge survives, at less than half its original strength. That second number is the real one. What it is not: about +3.3% a year with 4.6% drawdown, roughly one year in nine negative. At 0.01 lots that is ~130 a year - a figure that measures the position size, not the strategy.

Cost is the one input to a trading system that is knowable exactly, and it is almost always estimated wrongly - always in the direction that flatters the strategy. This EA measures what one round trip really costs on YOUR broker: the live spread sampled from ticks, the swap for both sides including the triple-charge day, and the commission read from your own deals. Most spread figures come from the bar's "spread" field, because that is the easy one to reach. It is a per-bar summary, not the quote at any instant. Measured on XAUUSD: 20 points live across 60 readings against a bar-field median of 6. A factor of 3.3. So a filter set to "skip if spread > 15" never fires - it lets through exactly the moments it exists to block. Swap is the half most custom simulators do not charge at all. It is asymmetric, one side pays while the other collects, and one weekday counts three times. Read-only: it never opens, closes or modifies a position.

Everyone running a grid asks: is my account big enough? The usual answer - the loss at the last grid level - is the wrong number. What ends the account is the margin level reaching the broker's stop-out, while the chain is still open and still looks recoverable. This EA computes the real figure, then counts how often a move that large has already happened on the symbol's own M1 history. Three mistakes it fixes, all erring in the reassuring direction: a chain of N legs floats at step x N(N-1)/2, not step x N (at 10 legs, 45 steps of loss, not 10); open positions also lock up margin while they float; and stop-out is a percentage, not zero - at 50%, losing half the equity is enough. "You need 86 dollars of room" is an abstraction. "A move that size happened 71 times in 100 days, one every 1.4" is a decision. Set InpEquity to a size you do not have yet to see what the configuration would really need. Strictly read-only: it never opens, closes or modifies a position.

This Expert Advisor is that missing bridge. Attach it to any chart and it periodically writes the calendar to a CSV file in `MQL5\Files`, where anything outside the terminal can read it.

Exporting your deal history is easy and a dozen scripts already do it..