Veteran Army Gold

Start with the loss, not the profit. First decide how deep a drawdown you are willing to sit through — and then let the system go after returns inside that limit. That is the order Veteran Army Gold works in. And because gold does not move the way currencies move, it works the market one price level at a time, buying and selling, instead of betting the account on a single idea.

The same discipline behind Veteran Army FX, applied to a single market that behaves like nothing else.

At a glance

• Market: XAUUSD only, traded on the H1 and H4 timeframes.
• Account: hedging required. The minimum balance depends on the preset you choose and on your broker's minimum lot size — see below.
• Risk: you pick the preset. Expected maximum drawdown 10-15% (Conservative), 20-25% (Moderate) or 35-40% (Aggressive).
• Trades: both directions, around 100 per month on average, held from hours to several days, always with a fixed stop.
• Setup: one file, attach it to any chart, nothing to tune.

Are you tired of unexpected losses?

You choose your maximum drawdown up front. Conservative, Moderate and Aggressive place the same trades and differ only in position size; each comes with a drawdown range from Monte Carlo stress testing, and the screenshots in the gallery show the result of every profile. Nothing about the risk is left for you to find out the hard way.

Does gold move too fast to trade safely?

Speed is only dangerous when you are guessing. This portfolio never holds an opinion about where gold is going — it waits at levels the market itself has already drawn and requires volatility to confirm the move before anything is placed. Every trade carries a fixed stop from the second it opens, with a size set by that strategy's own tested worst case, not by a flat percentage. A violent day is not a threat to a position that was sized for one. There is no grid, no martingale and no averaging down anywhere in it.

Do costs eat the edge?

Gold is expensive to hold, and most systems that trade it lose money every night without noticing. The spread is wide, commission is real, and the overnight swap is heavily one-sided — holding a buy position costs several times what holding a sell position pays. A model that ignores this looks profitable on paper and is not. Every figure on this page was produced with commission and the real, one-sided swap already charged, and positions are held for real moves rather than for the sake of being in the market.

So here is Veteran Army Gold. It starts from the loss and works backwards. It does not forecast; it covers ground. No hero trade, no rescue grid, no single point of failure.

Think of it as a special unit rather than a soldier. Every member is trained for one job on one market, and it does that job only when the conditions it was trained for are actually present. Some are built to move with a trend already underway. Others hold back and take the pullback inside that move. Each carries a fixed stop from the moment it engages, and standing orders to stay out when the market offers nothing: in a flat market its entry level is simply never reached, so the account stays light instead of manufacturing trades. Engage on the objective, or don't engage at all.

The models work from price structure: entries sit at reference levels the market itself creates — previous daily, weekly and monthly extremes, session highs and lows, recent range boundaries, volume-weighted levels — and are only taken when volatility confirms the move. A position is closed when its stop is hit, when its target is reached, when the conditions behind it disappear, or when a set number of bars has passed without the expected move. Twenty years of gold price history stand behind the models — the 2008 crisis, the 2011 peak, the 2013 collapse, the 2020 spike and the advance that followed.

Many small, weakly related positions beat one large confident one for a reason that predates all of us: the diversification effect at the heart of Modern Portfolio Theory. Bad patches that rarely overlap add up to much less damage than they would alone. Here that spread is built across entry rules, holding time and direction rather than across markets, because there is only one market. The edge is meant to come from breadth, never from leverage.

One file, self-contained. No DLLs, no indicators to install, no settings to tune. Attach it to any chart and the portfolio runs.

Live verification signal. A real-money account running this EA is published for verification. It exists to be looked at, not copied. Note that it deliberately runs the most extreme configuration the EA allows — the Aggressive preset with ReferenceCapital lowered to match a small deposit, roughly four times the risk of the Aggressive profile described below. It is a stress test, not the recommended setup, and its drawdowns will be far deeper than the ranges in this page.

https://www.mql5.com/en/signals/2384638   (Start Date 04 August 2026)

Account type: a hedging account is required.

Market Watch: XAUUSD must be visible (broker suffixes are detected automatically).

Risk presets

One input selects the risk profile. Lot sizes per strategy are pre-calibrated for each preset — nothing else needs to be tuned.

Approximate risk and return profile per preset. Return figures are derived from the backtest; drawdown ranges come from Monte Carlo stress testing of the portfolio at a two-year horizon, which gives a more conservative and more realistic estimate than any single backtest path:

Read these numbers with care. All figures are simulated, not live, results, and future drawdowns can exceed the Monte Carlo ranges. The return column assumes that profits are never withdrawn and are always reinvested, which no real account does. Do not choose Moderate unless a 25% drawdown would be acceptable to you, and do not choose Aggressive unless a 40% drawdown would be acceptable. Past performance does not guarantee future results.

Minimum account size

Recommended minimum account, to stay within the tested drawdown ranges given brokers' minimum lot requirements: 

Aggressive: 10 000 USD

Moderate: 15 000 USD

Conservative: 20 000 USD

Backtest summary (labeled, not live results)

MT5 Strategy Tester, "Every tick based on real ticks" modeling, real broker data with commission and the real one-sided swap. Each preset run appears in the gallery screenshots. The strategies themselves were built and validated on price history back to 2006; the tested window shown here is the more recent one, chosen on purpose.

These runs used one regulated broker's historical feed, commissions and swaps. Spreads, commissions, swap rates and server time differ between brokers and shift individual fills, so expect different figures elsewhere — which is why the live signal above exists.

Single-path backtest drawdowns understate risk: the Monte Carlo range for each profile is the planning number. In live use, withdraw profits periodically instead of compounding indefinitely. Past performance, simulated or real, does not guarantee future results.

To try the demo quickly, run the Strategy Tester with "1 minute OHLC" modeling — enough to see the portfolio place and manage trades, without downloading full tick data. It is a functional check, not a reproduction of the figures above.

Inputs, in the order they appear

Risk

• RiskPreset (default: Conservative) — selects the sizing table: Conservative, Moderate or Aggressive. This is the only input most users should ever change.
• ReferenceCapital (default: 20000) — the balance at which the published lot tables apply. Position sizes scale proportionally with Balance divided by ReferenceCapital. Leave at 20000 unless you deliberately want to re-anchor the sizing.

Execution

• MagicNumber (default: 18812066) — identifies this EA's orders on the account. Change it only if another EA on the same account happens to use the same number.
• SlippagePoints (default: 100) — maximum allowed price deviation for market executions, in points.
• MaxOpenPositions (default: 0 = unlimited) — optional hard cap on the number of simultaneously open positions across the whole portfolio. In twenty years of testing the portfolio never exceeded 26 concurrent positions, so the cap is off by default.

Stop Loss

• UseHiddenStopLoss (default: false) — keeps the working stop inside the EA instead of placing it at the broker. An emergency broker-side stop is still placed further away for protection.
• HardStopMultiplier (default: 1.5) — distance multiplier for that emergency broker-side stop. Used only when the hidden stop mode is on.

Symbols

• SymbolPrefix / SymbolSuffix (default: empty) — broker symbol naming adjustments. Both are auto-detected when left empty; fill them only if your broker uses unusual symbol names and auto-detection fails.

Advanced

• TimeOffsetHours (default: 0) — manual correction, in hours, added to broker time to match the GMT+2/GMT+3 New York-close convention the strategies assume. Leave at 0 for standard brokers.
• LogLevel (default: Trade) — journal verbosity. Trade logs order events; higher levels exist for troubleshooting.

Everything except RiskPreset is designed to be left at its default value.

Setup

1. Attach the EA to any single chart (symbol and timeframe do not matter).
2. Make sure XAUUSD is visible in Market Watch. Broker symbol suffixes (for example XAUUSD.m) are detected automatically.
3. Allow algorithmic trading and keep the terminal running — a VPS is recommended for 24/5 operation.
4. Choose your RiskPreset. Everything else can stay at defaults.

Launch pricing

The launch price is 899 USD. The price increases by 300 USD after every 10 copies sold, and it is never discounted — early buyers always keep the best price. If you want to evaluate the EA on a live account first, renting is available as a lower-cost option.

Ongoing stewardship

I run this portfolio on my own capital and continuously compare the live signal against the backtest's statistical expectations — using pre-defined bands, not month-to-month feelings. Maintenance updates (broker compatibility, execution improvements) are delivered through the Market's update mechanism and announced in the Comments section. What I will not do is quietly reoptimize the strategies after a normal losing stretch — that is exactly how curve-fitted products die. If live behaviour ever falls outside the pre-defined bands, I will say so openly in the Comments section and act on it transparently, with clear version notes.

Honest expectations

This is a wide portfolio on a single instrument. There will be losing weeks and losing months; the backtest itself contains them.

One characteristic is worth stating plainly, because you will meet it eventually. Every strategy here needs gold to move. When gold stops moving and price only drifts slowly, the whole portfolio goes quiet at the same time. Spreading risk across many strategies cannot remove a dependence they all share on the same market. In the twenty-year test, 2018 was exactly that year: the system traded normally all year and finished essentially flat. It did not blow up, and its drawdown that year was ordinary; it simply could not find anything to take. Expect a year like that from time to time, and judge the system over a full cycle rather than a quiet one.

No profitability is guaranteed. Do not trade with money you cannot afford to lose, and start on a demo account if you are new to automated trading.

Support is provided through the product Comments section and mql5.com messages.

The Veteran Army family