Pipsgrowth EX02004 Breakout

EX02004 is a Donchian channel breakout EA tuned for XAUUSD on the 5-minute chart. It uses a 20-bar channel by default (configurable through InpBreakoutBars), measures the high and low across that window on the most recent closed bar, and watches for the next bar's close to break above the channel high or below the channel low. The break has to clear the channel boundary; merely tapping the line is not a signal. The whole design is "SafeBreakout" in the sense that the trade is never taken on a tick against a fresh level — the close of a finished bar has to confirm that price has actually committed beyond the boundary, which removes most of the fakeouts you get from a naive channel-break system.

On top of the raw channel break, the EA runs a single moving average filter: an EMA(50) on the signal timeframe. For a long signal, the close has to be above the EMA and the EMA has to be flat or rising (current value greater than or equal to its previous bar's value). For a short signal, the close has to be below the EMA and the EMA has to be flat or falling. This is a slope filter as much as a level filter — a bar that breaks the channel but happens to print below a falling EMA on a long setup will be rejected. InpUseMaFilter toggles the whole EMA layer on or off; in production it stays on, but for backtests against choppy periods the operator can switch it off to see how much of the edge comes from the trend filter.

A second trend filter sits on the higher timeframe. The EA carries an EMA(50) on the H1 chart and asks whether the entry price agrees with the H1 trend direction: longs need price above H1 EMA(50), shorts need price below. If the M5 break is bullish but H1 is bearish, the trade is rejected with the reason "HTF-opposing-bull". This single check pulls out a lot of M5 breakouts that would otherwise fail against a stronger counter-trend on the hour. The H1 EMA(50) is implemented as a separate indicator handle (hHTF) so it does not pollute the M5 indicator stack.

Regime classification is the third filter. EX02004 runs a 7-state classifier called from ClassifyRegime() that combines ADX(14), ATR(14) percentile over a 50-bar window, and Bollinger Bands(20, 2.0) width. The states are StrongTrend, WeakTrend, Range, Breakout, Compress, Expand, and Choppy. A few transitions matter for entries: when the ATR is in the bottom 25th percentile of its 50-bar distribution, the regime is Compress and entries are blocked if InpUseRegimeFilter is true; when ADX(14) drops below 18, the regime is Choppy and entries are unconditionally blocked; when ADX is above 25 and ATR is in the top 25th percentile, the regime is Expand. Compress is a soft block (depending on the input), Choppy is a hard block. The other states are informational — they show up in the trade comment but do not gate entries. ManageOpenPositions() additionally force-closes any open position if the regime transitions into Choppy, which is the EA's way of not holding a position through a market that has stopped cooperating.

The position management has four layers, all of which can run on the same bar. First, a one-shot break-even: once price moves 1R in profit (R = initial SL distance in price terms), the stop is moved to entry plus one point. Second, a one-shot partial close at +1R: 50% of the position is closed if the open volume is at least twice the broker's minimum lot. Third, an ATR trailing stop: every tick, the stop is recomputed as current bid/ask minus 2.0 × ATR(14) (or plus 2.0 × ATR for shorts), and the stop is only ever ratcheted in the favorable direction. Fourth, a time exit: any position held for more than 288 M5 bars (24 hours of session time) is closed by TryClose_EX02004(). A signal flip in the opposite direction also forces an exit. Pyramid entries are coded but disabled: MAX_PYRAMID_LEVELS is set to 1, so the EA can only ever hold a single position per symbol at a time.

Sizing is risk-based. With InpRiskPercent = 0.5 (the default), CalcLot() takes 0.5% of effective capital, divides by the per-lot risk at the current SL distance (SL in price / tick size × tick value), and produces a lot size that is then normalized to the broker's lot step, lot min, lot max, and capped at InpMaxLot (default 100.0). If InpRiskPercent is set to zero, the EA falls back to InpFixedLot = 0.01, which is a useful setting for prop-firm challenge accounts where the operator wants to lock the lot size at a known value rather than recompute on every tick. OrderCalcMargin is run before the order is sent: if the order would consume more than the current free margin, the entry is refused. OpenPosition() also retries up to three times on requote/timeout/price-changed, with a 100ms sleep and a rate refresh between attempts.

The safety stack is the most defensive part of the EA. NoTradeGate() runs before every entry and refuses if: InpKillSwitch is on, spread exceeds 400 points (the input is XAUUSD-tuned, where 400 points on a 2-decimal broker equals $0.40 — a wide but not pathological gold spread), the regime is Choppy, the EA already has the maximum concurrent positions (default 1), the realized loss for the day exceeds 3% of effective capital, the cooldown window is active (5 M5 bars after a losing exit), equity has dropped below the 50.0 floor, the market is closed (weekend), a high-impact news event is in the calendar window (30 minutes each side, manual fallback if CalendarValueHistory returns no data), quotes are bad, or the symbol's trade mode is not full. IsSafeToTrade_EX02004() runs a second layer of guards: capital cap (if InpCapCapAmount > 0 and equity exceeds the cap, no new entries), min equity percentage (80% of initial balance — once equity drops 20% from the snapshot at OnInit, the EA refuses all further entries), max trades per day (50), max consecutive losses (3 → 4-hour cooldown enforced by the OnTradeTransaction handler), and the global drawdown kill switch (20% — once hit, all trading is halted and the EA only manages exits).

EX02004 carries its own GMT detection. On OnInit, DetectGMTOffset_EX02004() walks back through H1 bars looking for a weekend gap and computes the broker's GMT offset from the H1 bar that opens at 22:00 on Sunday. The detected offset is stored in g_gmtOffset and used by IsMarketOpen_EX02004() (no Saturday, no Sunday before 22:00 GMT, no Friday after 21:00 GMT) and InActiveSession_EX02004() (active if London 7-16 GMT or New York 12-21 GMT, with Asia 0-7 GMT avoided when InpAvoidAsia is true, which is the default). The session filter is independent of the optional InpUseSessionWindow flag, which is a separate broker-timezone session gate (6:00 to 20:00 broker time). The two overlap, but the GMT session is the live one and the broker-time window is the historical one — leaving the broker-time window off is the typical setting.

The OnTester() function is a custom selection criterion for the MT5 strategy tester. It computes net × profit factor divided by (1 + relative drawdown %), with hard gates: fewer than 30 trades returns 0, profit factor ≤ 0 returns 0, net ≤ 0 returns 0, and drawdown exceeding the InpMaxDDPct (20% by default) returns 0. The shape of the criterion rewards strategies with high net, high profit factor, and low drawdown simultaneously — a typical MT5 genetic optimizer would only reward profit, so this custom criterion pushes the optimizer toward balanced equity curves rather than the high-DD high-profit peaks that overfit.

The trade comment carries the regime name and a confidence number. The confidence is computed inside BreakoutSignal() as: span = channel high - channel low; dist = |close - boundary|; confidence = clamp(dist / span × 100 + 30, 10, 100). A breakout that closes 0.1% above the channel in a channel that is 0.5% wide gets a confidence around 50; a breakout that closes flush with the boundary in a narrow channel gets the floor of 10; a runaway break gets capped at 100. The number is informational — it does not gate the entry — but it shows up in the trade comment and in the strategy tester's deal list, so the operator can sort trades by confidence after a backtest.

For deployment, the EA is dry-run by default (InpDryRun = true), which means OnInit logs the signal and the lot/SL/TP it would have used but does not place the order. This is intentional: the source is shipped dry-run so that anyone loading it onto a live chart sees the signal flow before any real capital is committed. To go live, set InpDryRun = false. The minimum recommended balance is the floor (50.0) plus headroom for one trade's stop-loss at the EA's default risk: with a 0.5% risk on a $500 account, the per-trade dollar risk is $2.50, so a 200-point minimum SL on XAUUSD (the floor when ATR is small) translates to roughly 0.01 lots. The published minDeposit of 100 is enough to clear the floor with headroom for one trade at the default 0.01 fallback lot. The EA also responds to the meta-trader kill switch (InpKillSwitch = true), which is a separate manual off-switch that closes all open positions and blocks any new entries until flipped back.

The code is portable across FX majors if you change the magic and the spread cap — the brief header on line 4 says "Gold/Metals & FX majors (portable)", which is the developer's note that the logic itself is symbol-agnostic. The 400-point spread cap is XAUUSD-tuned; on EURUSD the equivalent cap would be 40-50 points. The HTF EMA(50) on H1 still works on a major — the period constant HTF_TIMEFRAME and HTF_MA_PERIOD are #defines near the top of the file and can be changed if you want a different higher timeframe for a different symbol's typical breakout horizon. The pyramid level cap, the ATR-based stops, and the regime classifier are symbol-agnostic; only the spread cap and the #define constants would need to be reviewed when porting.