Notus

Notus is a gold breakout Expert Advisor for XAUUSD, on MetaTrader 5, MetaTrader 4 and cTrader. Backtest on 257 million real ticks, July 2021 to October 2026: $10,000 grew to $17,292 at the default lot, profit factor 2.36, max drawdown 6.7%, 5 of 6 years in profit. Stop loss on every trade. No martingale, no grid.

Launch price is $499, with 20 activations. The price goes up $100 after every 10 copies sold.

Most gold EAs either trade all day or hold a losing position until it comes back. Notus does neither. It trades about 37 times a year, waits for gold to break a daily level, and then works hard on the position it has.

At a glance

Key features

• Breakout entries on daily levels. Notus reads its own daily and hourly bars, finds the levels gold hasn't broken yet, and places pending stop orders just before them. The broker fills the order when price gets there, so terminal lag doesn't cost you the entry.
• Buys and sells. Both directions are on. Over the test 155 of the 198 trades were buys, because gold spent most of those five years going up. If gold turns into a long downtrend, expect fewer trades and more of them short.
• Active trade management. This is where the money is made (see below). A quick breakeven, a pulled target when a trade goes against you, an early cut when the breakout fails in the first minutes, and a swing-based trailing stop.
• News filter for the US jobs report. Pending orders are cancelled and open trades closed around the first-Friday release.
• Spread filter. No new orders while spread is too wide.
• Distances scale with the gold price. One set of settings worked at $1,800 gold and works at $4,000 gold. Lot size can scale the same way, so risk per trade stays about the same as the price climbs.
• Restart-proof. After a terminal restart or a VPS reboot Notus finds its own orders and keeps managing them.
• No DLL, no internet connection, no outside server.

Why the management matters

I tested this the hard way. I kept the moments Notus enters the market and replaced its direction with a coin flip, 100 different coins. With the management on, all 100 runs were profitable. With the management off, the same coin flips lost money on every real-tick run.

So the entry tells you when gold is about to move. The management is what turns that into money. Notus ships with all of it switched on.

Backtest results

Exness raw-spread account, real tick data with the real spread of every tick, commission included, default settings. Swap is not included (the median trade is open 3.8 hours, a few stay over the weekend). Lot: 0.1 per $2,000 of gold price, so about 0.11 lot in 2021 and 0.05 lot at $4,000 gold.

The pattern is simple. When gold trends, Notus earns well. When it chops around, it stays close to flat and the losses stay small. The biggest drawdown of the whole test, $674, came in late 2021.

Average win $106, average loss $68. One in four trades is closed early by the reversal cut, usually for a few dollars, which is why the losses stay small.

Checked on a second platform. The cTrader version, run on cTrader's own tick data (Spotware demo server, January 2025 to October 28, 2026), made +$2,802 from $10,000, profit factor 3.40, max balance drawdown 5.1% over 56 trades. Different broker, different data, and daily bars cut at the New York close instead of UTC. Same picture.

Costs. Screenshot 5 adds up to $1.00 of extra cost to every trade, on top of the real spread. Profit factor is still 1.94.

Requirements and risk

Drawdown grows in step with the lot. At the default lot the test's worst drawdown was 6.7%. Doubling the lot means roughly double that, around 13%. I wouldn't go above that. There is also a percent-risk lot mode (plus an optional Kelly sizing on MT4/MT5) if you prefer to size by the stop loss.

A raw spread or ECN account is best, since the test ran on raw spread plus commission. A standard account works too, screenshot 5 shows what a wider spread costs. A VPS is recommended, Notus has to be running when a level breaks.

Quick setup

1. Open an XAUUSD chart, any timeframe (M15 is fine), and attach Notus.
2. Keep the defaults. They're the settings of the backtest above, built in.
3. Set the lot (see the table above).
4. Tell Notus your broker's clock (MT4/MT5 only). Two inputs: how many hours the server is ahead of UTC in winter (0 on Exness, 2 on most brokers), and whether it adds an hour in US summer time (true for those GMT+2/+3 brokers). Notus uses this to start every daily bar at 00:00 UTC, exactly as in the backtest, whatever your broker's clock. cTrader runs on UTC already, nothing to set.
5. Turn on Algo Trading. Done.

Main parameters

Everything else is the strategy itself. Leave it at default unless you know why you're changing it.

FAQ

Why didn't it trade today? Normal. About 37 trades a year, and some months have none. Notus needs a daily level and a break of it.

Which broker? Any broker with XAUUSD and a raw or ECN account. Exness Raw and cTrader's Spotware data were both used in testing.

Does it work on other symbols? It was built and tested on gold only. I don't sell it for anything else.

Prop firm? It has a stop loss on every trade and low drawdown at the default lot, but no built-in daily loss limit. Check your firm's rules first.

More than one trade at a time? Yes, up to 5 when the same level fills more than once. Each has its own stop loss.

Do I need to change settings? No. The defaults are the tested ones. The clock (setup step 4) is the one thing to check.

Support

Message me after purchase and I'll help you set it up. Updates are free. Every change is backtested on the full 2021-2026 tick history before it goes out.

Risk warning. Trading gold on margin carries a high level of risk. The results above come from historical backtests, not live trading, and past performance does not guarantee future results. Test on a demo account first and only trade money you can afford to lose.