Pipsgrowth EX02031 Breakout

Pipsgrowth EX02031 XAUUSD Breakout is a single-purpose breakout EA for gold that fires on two specific clock times each trading day — 8:00 and 13:00 server time — and arms a paired stop-entry on either side of the prior 1-hour M15 range. The strategy ignores trend, momentum, volatility regime, and indicator consensus; it is a pure scheduled break-and-enter system. Every other decision in the code is about whether it is safe to place those orders right now, not whether the market looks like it wants to break.

The range is built from the four most recent completed M15 candles at the moment the trigger fires, so a BuyStop at the London open (8:00) is positioned relative to the high and low of the 7:00–7:45 M15 block. The same logic at 13:00 reads the 12:00–12:45 block for the New York open. The high of that range becomes the BuyStop trigger, the low becomes the SellStop trigger, and a 10-point buffer (InpBreakoutBuf) is added on each side so the order is not sitting exactly on the boundary where noise tends to spike. SL is set 40 points (InpStopLoss) on the far side of the range and TP is set 80 points (InpTakeProfit) on the profitable side, giving a 1:2 reward-to-risk on every breakout arm.

Both pending orders are sent in a single tick using CTrade.BuyStop and CTrade.SellStop, with a margin pre-check via OrderCalcMargin: if the projected BuyStop cannot be funded from ACCOUNT_MARGIN_FREE, the EA skips the cycle and waits for the next session open. Order acceptance is verified by TRADE_RETCODE_DONE or TRADE_RETCODE_PLACED, and the EA retries up to three times on transient errors (REQUOTE, TIMEOUT, PRICE_OFF, PRICE_CHANGED) with a 200ms sleep between attempts. Anything that is not a transient error breaks the loop immediately, and the EA moves on.

A guard called HasTrade() runs at the top of the cycle and rejects any arming attempt when at least one position is already open for this symbol and magic number. This means only one breakout attempt can be live at a time — once a pending order is filled and the position is opened, the second pending order (or the next session's setup) is suppressed until the position is closed. A second throttle on the same variable is lastSession: a timestamp that prevents re-arming within 3000 seconds (~50 minutes) of the previous arm, so even if both triggers fire in the same M15 candle the EA only places orders once.

The hardening layer is unusually heavy for such a small EA. DetectGMTOffset_EX02031 walks every offset from −12 to +12 and scores each by weekday (Mon–Fri +10) and hour (07:00–21:00 +5) to pick the most plausible GMT offset for the broker. IsMarketOpen_EX02031 blocks trading on Saturday and Sunday, blocks the first two hours of Monday (broker rollover), and blocks the last two hours of Friday. InActiveSession_EX02031 reads InpUseGMTSessions and — when true — restricts to the London window (07:00–16:00 GMT) or the New York window (12:00–21:00 GMT); the default for that flag is false, which means in default configuration the session filter is permissive and only the clock-time trigger decides.

IsNewsTime_EX02031 pulls CalendarValueHistory for the ±30 minute window around the current server time and flags any high-importance event, blocking entries while InpFilterNews is true. Capital protection is built from four inputs: InpCapAmount caps the effective capital when non-zero, InpCapFloor (1000 by default) is the minimum effective capital that must remain, InpMinEquityPct (70%) is the equity floor relative to the initial balance captured at OnInit, and InpDailyLossLimitPct (5%) cuts off trading the moment the day's realized P&L breaches that share of the initial balance. The daily counters — g_tradesToday, g_realizedToday, g_consecLosses — are rotated at the day boundary by UpdateDailyCounters_EX02031, with a separate weekly counter for the realized P&L aggregate.

Trade lifecycle is tracked through OnTradeTransaction: only DEAL_ENTRY_OUT, INOUT, and OUT_BY deals are summed into realized P&L (entries are ignored), and the profit figure includes swap and commission so the cooldown logic reacts to net loss, not just gross. After InpMaxConsecLosses (5 by default) consecutive losses, the EA sets g_cooldownUntil to the current time plus InpCooldownHours × 3600 (4 hours) and refuses all new entries until that timestamp passes. The OnTester routine is a simple composite: profit × profit factor ÷ max equity drawdown, with profit factor clamped to 1.0 if it falls outside (0, 1000) and drawdown floored to 1.0 to avoid divide-by-zero; the result is gated to zero when total trades is below 10, which is the minimum sample size this EA needs in a backtest to be considered meaningful.

What this means in practice: a trader who loads EX02031 on an XAUUSD M15 chart gets one well-defined behavior — twice a day, the EA places a buy above and a sell below the most recent hour's range, and either one fills (the other is suppressed by HasTrade) or neither fills and the cycle resets at the next session open. There is no partial close, no breakeven ratchet, no trailing stop, no pyramiding, and no news-aware TP management. The exit is whatever the SL or TP hits first, or the position being closed by the broker on margin/EOB, or the EA's own cooldown path after a losing streak. That is the whole strategy.

The clock trigger itself is server time, not GMT — the EA reads TimeCurrent into an MqlDateTime and tests dt.hour==8 && dt.min==0 or dt.hour==13 && dt.min==0. That means the broker's server time zone determines when the EA sees London and New York opens, which is why DetectGMTOffset_EX02031 still exists: the offset is used to evaluate the session and news guards correctly even though the trigger hours are hard-coded in server time. On a GMT+2 or GMT+3 broker the trigger aligns naturally with the real session opens; on a GMT broker the trigger is 8 and 13 GMT, which is one hour after the standard London open (08:00 GMT) and exactly the NY open (13:00 GMT) — that gap is intentional in the source, and a trader who wants different behavior has to either shift InpLondonStartGMT/InpNewYorkStartGMT inside the optional InpUseGMTSessions gate, or run the EA on a broker whose server time already matches their preferred session definition.