Aurum Channel Breakout

Aurum Channel Breakout is a trend-following Expert Advisor for gold (XAUUSD). It trades breakouts of a price channel with simple, fixed rules and a stop loss on every trade.

How it trades

At each new H4 bar the EA finds the highest high and the lowest low of the last 40 closed H4 bars. It places a buy stop order at the high and a sell stop order at the low. Each order carries a stop loss of 2 x ATR(20) of H4. When one order fills, the other is removed, so the EA holds at most one position. The stop loss then trails 3 x ATR behind the best price reached since entry and is moved at each H4 close. There is no fixed take profit: a trade ends at its stop loss or trailing stop. Orders are refreshed at each new H4 bar, and a level that price has already passed is not chased.

What it does not use

No martingale, no grid, no averaging, no hedging of positions, no news trading, no DLLs and no internet requests.

What to expect

A breakout system loses more trades than it wins. In the backtests about 4 in 10 trades were winners, and a few long trends paid for many small losses. Flat or losing periods of several months are normal for this kind of system, and some years ended with a loss. In recent years long trades did better than short trades while gold was rising.

How it was tested

The rules come from well-known channel-breakout methods. Four strategy families were compared on 2010-2018 gold data and checked on 2019-2022; the chosen settings were then run once on 2023 to mid-2026 data that had not been used before. These tests use minute data with the real bid and ask spread. The EA was then run in the MetaTrader 5 Strategy Tester on real ticks from two data sources (2024-2026), and its trades matched the research simulation.

Backtest summary at 1 % risk per trade, 2010 to mid-2026 (a backtest, not live trading): largest drawdown about 13 %, losing years 2012, 2018 and 2021, about 47 trades a year. Past results, simulated or real, do not guarantee future results.

Recommendations

• Symbol: XAUUSD, with any suffix (for example XAUUSD.m or XAUUSDr).
• Chart timeframe: any. The EA reads H4 data itself.
• Account: hedging or netting.
• Balance: 5,000 USD or more at the default risk of 1 %. A typical stop is 40 to 80 USD per 0.01 lot at 2026 volatility. On smaller balances the EA skips a trade rather than risk more than twice the set amount.
• A broker with a low gold spread. Trades last about 2 to 4 days, so swap affects the result.
• A VPS, so that the trailing stop keeps working. The initial stop loss is always on the broker's server.
• Run the free demo in the Strategy Tester with "Every tick based on real ticks" on your broker before using it.

Inputs

Risk per trade (% of balance) or a fixed lot; the minimum-lot allowance; the largest lot; channel timeframe and length; ATR length; initial stop and trailing stop in ATR; long and short switches; allow new trades; magic number; order comment; levels on the chart.

Trading involves risk of loss. Use only money you can afford to lose.