Prop Firm Circuit Breaker

Hard limits for prop firm and challenge accounts

Prop firm rules are not suggestions. Breach the daily loss limit by one dollar and the account is gone, whatever the equity curve looked like an hour earlier. The problem is that the rule lives on the firm's server while your positions live in your terminal, and nothing in MetaTrader 5 connects the two. Prop Firm Circuit Breaker sits on one chart and watches the whole account. The name is literal: an exchange halts trading when a threshold is breached, and so does this. When a limit you defined is reached, it closes everything and refuses to let the account trade again until the condition resets. It watches every position on the account, including ones you opened by hand and ones opened by other Expert Advisors. There is no magic  number filter.

What it protects

• Daily drawdown. Measured either from the balance fixed at the start of your trading day, or trailing the highest equity reached during it. The trailing mode is the strict one: it catches the trader who is up 800 at lunchtime and gives it all back by the close. The limit is expressed in your account currency or as a percentage, and the reference is rebuilt every day at a time you choose in broker server time.

• 1% in 1 Hour for Correlated pairs rule. EURUSD and GBPUSD do not lose money independently, and neither do NAS100 and SP500. Define up to five groups. When the combined loss inside a group crosses your limit within a rolling window, that group is locked for the length of the window and any new position on those symbols is closed on sight. The other groups keep trading.

• Equity target. Challenge accounts are lost after the target is hit far more often than before. Set the target, and the moment equity touches it the EA closes everything and locks the account permanently. The lock is written to disk, so restarting the terminal or rebooting the VPS does not give the account another run at the same number.
• The clock. Close everything at a fixed time each day, and again on Friday before the weekend gap. Both on broker server time. 
• Deposits and withdrawals are not losses. A payout drops equity without a single trade being placed. The EA recognises balance operations and shifts the daily reference and the peak by the same amount, so the allowance you had a second earlier is the allowance you still have. Without this a withdrawal would read as an instant drawdown and liquidate the account.
• Missing stop losses. Any position that appears without a stop loss gets one within a quarter of a second, sized so the loss at the stop equals the amount you specified. Broker minimum distances are respected.

MetaTrader 5, any broker, any account currency, hedging or netting. One chart, any symbol, any timeframe. Algo trading enabled.

HOW EACH MODULE WORKS

Daily drawdown

The reference is rebuilt at every day boundary from the higher of balance and equity. Balance based measures the loss from that fixed figure; equity based measures it from the highest equity since the boundary, so giving back your limit fires even while you are up on the day. A percentage limit is a percentage of the day-start reference, fixed for the session. Deposits and withdrawals move the reference and the peak together, so a payout never reads as a loss. On breach everything closes and stays closed until the next reset.

Correlated group lock

Five groups of comma-separated symbols share one window length and one loss limit. Unknown symbols are reported and skipped. Closed trades only sums deals closed in the window, swap and commission included, and locks from the last losing trade. Closed trades plus open profit adds the group's floating result and locks from the trigger. They are alternatives, not two budgets.

Example. Window 60, limit 1000, group EURUSD,GBPUSD . EURUSD closes −500 at 10:00 and GBPUSD −500 at 10:40, so the group locks until 11:40 while NAS100 keeps trading. Four hours apart nothing locks: two losses in one hour on correlated pairs is a correlated event, two across a session is ordinary trading.

After a lock expires, only trades closed since it ended count towards the next one.

Equity target

Equity touches the target, everything closes, the account locks permanently across restarts. Clear it by setting InpUseEquityTarget to false and restarting — a lock you can restart your way out of is not a lock.

Daily close and Friday close

HH:MM on broker server time, once per occurrence. A schedule missed while the terminal was down is marked handled rather than run late; a restart within five minutes of the moment still closes.

Automatic stop loss

Only positions with no stop loss are touched. The distance comes from lot size and tick value so the loss at the stop equals your figure, and percent means percent of balance, never equity. A stop inside the broker's minimum distance is pulled to the nearest legal price.

QUESTIONS

Will it close trades opened by my other EA? Yes. There is no magic number filter — every position on the account is in scope. This is the entire point, and it is also the thing to be sure about before you install it.

Can it stop my other EA from opening the trade in the first place? No. MQL5 offers no way to do that. The position is detected and closed within milliseconds, which costs the spread. There is no product on the platform that can do better, whatever its description claims.

Does it work in the Strategy Tester? It runs without errors and switches to a one second timer there instead of the live 250 ms watchdog, so a test is not slowed down by millions of timer events. It opens no trades of its own, so there is little to see, and alerts and push notifications are suppressed. This is a live tool.

My account is in EUR / GBP / JPY. Do I write the limits in dollars? No. Every money setting is in your account currency, and the panel and journal label every figure with it. Nothing in this product assumes dollars.

My broker calls it EURUSD.pro . What do I type in the group? EURUSD . Detection handles the rest. Fill in the prefix and suffix inputs only if the automatic choice is wrong.

Two copies on two charts? Do not. They will race each other on the same closes. One chart is enough — the EA never reads the chart's own symbol.

The daily lock fired. How do I trade again? Wait for InpDayStartTime . The lock clears with the daily reset. There is no manual override, because a limit you can wave away is not a limit.

The equity target lock fired and I want to keep trading. Set InpUseEquityTarget to false and restart the EA. It will report the clearing in the journal.

I took a payout and the account did not close. Is that right? Yes. A deposit or withdrawal moves the daily reference and the peak by the same amount, so a payout cannot be mistaken for a trading loss. The journal records the adjustment.

Netting or hedging? Both are supported.

Does it need internet access, a licence server or a DLL? None of the three.

This is a seatbelt, not a driver. It does not improve a strategy, it does not choose entries, and it will not make a losing system profitable. What it does is make sure that one bad hour cannot end an account that took weeks to fund.

It is also only as correct as the numbers you put into it. Read your firm's rulebook, confirm your broker's server time, and set your limits slightly inside the firm's rather than exactly on them.

Support is through the product's Comments section.