Kobold EA MT5

Robustness: every strategy passed my full test suite

A backtest only shows that a strategy made money in the past. The real question is whether that was a real edge, luck, or settings tuned until the curve looked good. Before a strategy goes into KOBOLD, it has to survive tests built to break it:

• Costs and timing: doubled fees, extra slippage, and every entry delayed by one bar
• Luck: significance on both the data used to build it and data it never saw, beating 200 random-entry strategies, the Harvey-Liu haircut for how many ideas were tested, and Monte Carlo resampling
• Overfitting: held-out performance, walk-forward periods, probability of backtest overfitting, and a look-ahead audit
• Fragility: nearby versions of every setting, broad parameter changes, randomly removing 20% of trades, and removing the 10 best trades

All three strategies passed every test. Most ideas my research produces don't.

The three strategies

• Edge 1 compares the Nikkei with GBPJPY and buys when the index sits high in its recent range and momentum hasn't broken down.
• Edge 2 buys calm, steady markets with no recent drawdown, as long as the move isn't overextended.
• Edge 3 buys quiet, sideways conditions close to the 60-bar average, when no opening-range breakout has happened.

Each has its own stop loss (2 to 3 ATR), take profit (4.5 ATR). 

Protection, built in

• Max Daily Loss % (default 4%): when KOBOLD's result for the day, closed and open trades together, reaches this share of your equity, it closes its positions and stops until the next day.
• Min Margin Level % (default 300%): it won't open a trade that would push your margin level below this.
• One switch turns Protection on or off, and you set both levels yourself.

On top of that, built in limits stop any single trade from risking more than 5% of equity. The strategy's own stop loss is never moved.

When it trades

Monday to Friday. Entries between 11:30 and 16:30 server time, and everything is closed by 17:00. On the common GMT+2 / GMT+3 broker server, that's 04:30 to 09:30 New York time. Nothing is held overnight, so there is no swap or prop violation. 

Setup in 3 steps

1. Open a JPN225 chart on M30 (your broker may call it JP225 or NIKKEI225)
2. Attach KOBOLD
3. Set your Trade Size and max dd limit

Good to know

• Long only, so it sits out falling markets.
• Edge 1 needs GBPJPY at your broker. Without it, Edges 2 and 3 still trade normally.
• Losing streaks happen: up to 12 losses in a row in the backtest.
• On a hedging account each strategy can hold its own trade. On a netting account KOBOLD holds one trade at a time.