Thanks for this.

Which of the three strategies delivered your nice graph?

Hi Patrick it was just out of the box with the Auto Switch turned on so the engine selects the best strategy for the market during the backtest.
All optimised parameters out of the box, dashboard off for performance, 2023-01-01-> 2025-12-31.

Optimised for them to all work together with different strategies picking up the load during different market periods.  Pullback and Breakout being the workhorses.

Wonderful thank you. :-)

By the way Paul,

Just to let you know this might be a bit confusing.

The word "Inactive" suggests that the EA is not working. 

I am going to guess that it IS working - but not active because the London time session has not started yet - but does make one wonder. 

Same with "Shield Inactive" - suggests that there is a setting we have not got turned on correctly. 

Just FYI. 

:-)

Hey Patrick, great eye! Both labels are completely normal — the EA is running perfectly.

INACTIVE — This just means the EA is outside its trading session window right now. The Pullback strategy only trades during London hours (09:00–12:00 UTC). Outside those hours, it shows INACTIVE. When the session opens, it switches to ACTIVE and starts scanning for setups. It doesn't miss anything — it's intentionally waiting for the right session.

SHIELD UNARMED — The Shield is a profit protection feature. It "arms" once the account hits a configurable profit milestone (default: +10% above starting equity). Once armed, if equity pulls back to a set percentage, the Shield activates and blocks new trades to protect your gains. "UNARMED" just means the account hasn't hit that profit milestone yet — it's normal when you first attach the EA. Once your equity grows enough, you'll see it change to "Shield Armed" (green), and if it ever triggers, it shows "SHIELDED" (magenta).

So: INACTIVE = waiting for London session (by design), SHIELD UNARMED = waiting for profits to reach the arming threshold (by design). Everything is working exactly as intended! :-)

One more thing — at 07:33 UTC, the Pullback strategy was the one selected by AutoSwitch, and its default session window is 09:00–12:00 UTC, which is why it showed INACTIVE at that time. If you load the optimised set file from my blog post, the Pullback window widens to 07:00–15:00 UTC — so at 07:33 it would have already shown ACTIVE and been scanning for entries.

The optimised set file also tunes all three strategies (Pullback, Breakout, and RSI Reversal) with wider session hours and refined parameters. You can grab it here: https://www.mql5.com/en/blogs/post/768314

Thank you.

for some reason your link does not work when clicked.

One has to copy / paste it into a new page the it works. 

If your EA shows INACTIVE right now

The Weekly Regime Filter is blocking trades because EURUSD has been range-bound — the current geopolitical situation (US-Iran, oil crisis) is keeping the weekly trend flat.

To fix it: In Inputs, find the Regime Filter section and change "Min weekly EMA slope %" from its current value to 0.10. It will be 0.30 if you're on defaults or 0.15 if you loaded the optimised set file. Either way, lower it to 0.10 for now.

This is a different parameter from PB_MinEMASlope — that one filters M5 candle trends. The one you need is the weekly slope threshold under Regime Filter.

I've updated my signal to 0.10 and it's back ACTIVE. A more appropriate default is on the release path for the next version.

No trades all day?

Is this normal?

Hey Patrick — totally understand, a quiet day is frustrating when you're watching the chart.

The main issue was the Weekly Regime Filter on EURUSD — the weekly trend has been unusually flat recently (~0.15% slope) and the default threshold was just tight enough to block entries. I've loosened it slightly and posted the update in the comments around 18:00 UTC yesterday, so if you were running before that, trades were being blocked at the gate before any setup could even be evaluated.

Beyond that, the market itself has been rough — the US-Iran escalation rattled everything last week. Energy prices spiking, stocks sliding, massive volatility across the board. In conditions like these, the EA's built-in filters (ADX trend strength, ATR volatility, RSI momentum, EMA alignment) are doing exactly what they should — rejecting weak setups rather than forcing trades into war-driven noise. The EA has session guards, news filters and day-of-week guards all working together too, and they're all optimised from multi-round backtesting so I wouldn't want to loosen those just to generate more trades in abnormal conditions.

Sometimes fewer trades IS the right answer. With the regime fix applied from the start today, you should see normal activity. Let me know how it goes!

Patrick, thanks for raising this — you make a good point, the ACTIVE pill can be confusing.

To clarify: the green ACTIVE / red INACTIVE status on the dashboard is NOT about trading session hours. It reflects the Weekly Regime Filter — whether the weekly trend is strong enough to allow trading at all.

• ACTIVE = weekly trend slope exceeds the RegimeMinSlope threshold. The EA is allowed to look for trades.
• INACTIVE = weekly trend is too flat or choppy. All trading is suspended until the trend strengthens, regardless of time of day.

Session hours are shown separately on each strategy line (Breakout, RSI Reversal, Pullback). When you see "BLK" next to a strategy, that means you are outside that strategy's trading window. Each strategy has its own session hours configured in the inputs.

So you can see ACTIVE (regime is fine) but all three strategies showing BLK (outside trading hours) — that is normal behaviour outside London/New York sessions.

I will look at making this clearer on the dashboard in the next version. Apologies for the confusion.

Quick correction to my previous reply — I dug deeper into the code and Patrick, you were actually spot on.

The ACTIVE/INACTIVE pill is a master switch that covers everything, not just the regime filter. It goes INACTIVE if ANY of these conditions fail:

1. Outside the current strategy's session hours (this is what you correctly identified)
2. Weekly trend too flat (regime filter)
3. Blocked day of the week (e.g. Wednesday, Friday)
4. News filter blackout window
5. Daily loss limit or equity shield triggered

So when you see INACTIVE before London opens — that is exactly what you guessed. The EA is working fine, it is just waiting for its trading window.

I gave you the wrong answer earlier, apologies for that. You were right that session hours are part of it. I will add an INACTIVE reason line to the dashboard in the next version so it shows exactly which gate is blocking (e.g. "Reason: SESSION" or "Reason: REGIME"). That should remove the guesswork.

Thanks again for pushing on this — it led me to a genuine improvement for the next release.

Totally cool!! 

:-)

Updated set file available (v2). The original optimised set had Breakout exclusion values that wrapped past midnight — the EA doesn't support wrap-around, so they were silently ignored. v2 corrects all exclusion windows, blocks Tuesday breakouts (22.5% WR / -335 pips in research), restores Pullback to Both directions, and adds the new TrailingSpreadMult parameter from v4.91.

Full changelog with tables showing every parameter change and the effective trading windows is in my blog post: https://www.mql5.com/en/users/mortah/blog

Hi Fouzy, appreciate you flagging this.

So what's happening is totally normal — the EA sizes positions based on your account balance, the stop loss distance, and Gold's contract value. Gold's pip value is roughly $10 per lot compared to $1 on forex, so even at the default 1.5% risk (which is already half what the EURUSD version uses), the lots come out much bigger than you'd expect.

Quick example: say you've got a $5k account, 1.5% risk, 5-pip stop — that works out to $75 risk / (5 x $10) = 1.5 lots. So your 1.67 is bang on what the formula should produce.

Few things you can do to bring it down:

1. Drop RiskPerTrade to 0.5-1.0% in the inputs tab — biggest difference you'll notice straight away
2. Make sure CompoundAggressive is off if you've got it on — that reinvests profits into sizing so lots creep up after a good run
3. Set MaxLotSize to something like 0.5 or 1.0 as a hard ceiling — no trade will exceed that regardless of what the risk formula calculates
4. Worth checking your broker's contract spec too — some use 100oz per lot, others 10oz, which changes everything

Nothing wrong with the EA — it's doing exactly what it should. Gold just needs a lighter touch on the risk % because of how the contract is valued. I run my own signal at the 1.5% default but on a smaller account so the lots stay reasonable.

The live-tuned set file and full parameter breakdown are in my blog: https://www.mql5.com/en/users/mortah/blog

Thanks Paul for free EA.  for   the impossible EA  we can still use the v3 optimized set file  or just  use the default which comes with ver.4.9 . ?

Hi Khushab for The Impossible EA you need to download and use the 2026 v3 Optimised set file from the blog at https://www.mql5.com/en/blogs/post/768314 these contain parameters for the latest out of sample market conditions and if anything changes a v4 will be posted in this blog.
The default parameters achieve all the backtest results that are in the description and marketing to ensure we were not misleading anyone with the claims.
Market conditions are not good at the moment but the v3 parameters are till picking up a few wins and should hopefully recover my signal isn't under tight control like a prop firm so not too worried just yet

Just a quick FYI anyone if you are noticing the EA not trading at the moment given market conditions your need to load the v4 optimisation settings from the optimisation blog https://www.mql5.com/en/blogs/post/768314 or manually change the settings, Look at the top line: Weekly Regime: FLAT (slope 0.07%, need +/-0.30%). The EA won't trade because the weekly EMA slope is too flat to meet the 0.30% threshold. Go into EA Properties → Inputs 
and change these two: 
RegimeAllowFlat = true 
RegimeMinSlope = 0.10 
That tells the EA it's OK to trade even when the market isn't strongly trending. Without this, it'll just sit there INACTIVE whenever EURUSD consolidates — which is most of the time right now, without the set file or manual modification you will be running on the stricter defaults.