Gold News Straddle

An OCO straddle around scheduled economic releases on XAUUSD. Takes the move in whichever direction it happens, instead of predicting it.

Gold News Straddle places a Buy Stop above price and a Sell Stop below price a few seconds before a scheduled tier-1 economic release. Whichever side is triggered first is kept and managed to a fixed take profit or stop loss; the opposite pending order is cancelled immediately.

The EA never forms a directional opinion. It assumes only that a scheduled release produces a move large enough to break one side of the straddle, and it takes that move regardless of which way the market goes.

What it does not do

• No grid. No martingale. No averaging down. No recovery cycles.
• No position is ever opened without a stop loss.
• No more than one position at a time.
• No hidden lot multiplication: the volume you set is the volume it trades, reduced only when free margin cannot carry it.
• No claim of a live track record. See Verify it yourself below.

How it trades

• Arms 30 seconds before a scheduled release (configurable)
• Buy Stop at Ask + distance, Sell Stop at Bid − distance
• One side triggers, the other is cancelled (OCO)
• If the broker refuses the cancellation because the order is frozen for execution and both sides fill, a safety net closes the unintended position and reports it
• Stop loss and take profit are recomputed from the actual fill price when an order fills through a gap, so a spike cannot leave the take profit behind the entry
• Pending orders expire if neither side triggers within the window
• Lot volume is reduced automatically when free margin cannot carry both legs

Self-contained by design

The release schedule is compiled into the EA. There is no CSV to download, no file to place in any folder, no calendar subscription. Attach it to a chart and it works.

On live and demo accounts the EA also queries MetaTrader's own economic calendar and prefers it when reachable, so the schedule maintains itself. Inside the Strategy Tester that API is unavailable (MetaTrader returns error 4014), so the compiled-in schedule is used there. The EA prints which source it chose at startup.

Distances scale with price

Distances are a percentage of price, not a fixed dollar amount. This matters more than it sounds. A fixed $10 straddle distance is a 0.59% move at $1,700 gold and 0.23% at $4,400, so the same setting means something entirely different after a long trend. During development, changing from a fixed distance to a price-scaled one took the trigger rate from 6.6% to 21% over the same period and tripled the sample size. ATR-based distances are also available.

Verify it yourself before buying

Backtest results

XAUUSD M5, every tick based on real ticks, 2022-01-01 to 2026-08-19, 0.50 lots on a 10,000 deposit:

Trades 111 Profit factor 2.74 Win rate 65.8% Net profit +103.5% Max drawdown 4.33% (closed trades) Positive years 5 of 5 Largest single win 4.5% of total net profit

Every one of those thresholds was written down before the test was run, not selected after seeing the numbers. The profit factor rose as the sample grew — 2.49 at 35 trades, 2.74 at 111 — which is the opposite of what an overfitted result does.

What this EA does not have

It has no live track record. Every figure above comes from the Strategy Tester.

I would rather state that than have you discover it. Two limitations deserve your attention before you buy:

• MetaTrader's historical data for XAUUSD contains real ticks for only about 7 of the 1,380 minutes in a trading day; the rest is interpolated from M1 bars. This strategy's entry happens in the seconds after a release — precisely the part of the data that is least faithful. The average slippage the backtest reports is therefore optimistic. Real news-time slippage can only be measured forward.
• Results on any symbol other than XAUUSD are untested. The EA runs there and switches to ATR-based distances so its orders stay valid, but I make no claim about those results.

Run it on a demo account through several releases first, and judge it on the slippage you observe rather than on the figures above.

Requirements

Note on the compiled-in schedule

The built-in schedule covers 2022-01-04 to 2026-12-30. Live and demo accounts use MetaTrader's calendar and are unaffected by that end date. Backtests past it find no events to arm, and the EA says so explicitly rather than sitting silently idle. Updated schedules ship with product updates.

Disclaimer

Trading gold and CFDs carries substantial risk and is not suitable for every investor. Past performance does not guarantee future results, and losses are possible. Backtest results in particular do not guarantee live results, and this product's documentation states plainly which of its numbers are backtested rather than live.

Results vary between brokers because spreads, slippage, execution speed and freeze levels differ. For a strategy that enters in the seconds after a news release, those differences matter more than they would for most systems.

Test on a demo account before committing real capital.