I recently found a Gold trading bot called Advanced Gold Pattern EA for MetaTrader that was advertised as having a 100% win rate. Curious about the stellar success rate, I thought I’d take a closer look to see if I can confirm the results and perhaps figure out how the EA pulls of this hat trick.

This story is solely for general information purposes, and should not be relied upon for trading recommendations or financial advice. Source code and information is provided for educational purposes only, and should not be relied upon to make an investment decision. Please review my full cautionary guidance before continuing.

What is Meta Trader?

Meta Trader is a proprietary trading software developed by MetaQuotes Ltd and is geared towards Forex and Commodity trading that offers trading signals, alerts and support to traders. It is also the software of choice for several trading robots.

Trade Ideas provides AI stock suggestions, AI alerts, real-time stock market data, charting, scanning, automated trading, educational resources, and more. Get a 15% discount with promo code ‘BOTRADING15’.

What are Expert Advisors?

Expert Advisors (EAs) are what trading bots are called in Meta Trader. An Expert Advisor can be programmed to notice specific trends in the market, and then place buy or sell orders on your behalf in reaction to those trends. The bot aims aim to make money by making more successful trades than losing trades, and this cuts down on both time spent monitoring markets and human error by placing orders automatically.

What is the Advanced Gold Pattern EA?

The Advanced Gold Pattern EA is an Expert Advisor for Meta Trader 4 and 5 developed by a trader called Ho Tuan Thang, which is advertised to have a 100% rate. The EA is trading Gold (XAUUSD) on the 15 minute chart.

Although the actual trading strategy is kept a secret, the EA description page provides some clues about how the EA works: The trader states that the bot is not using Martingale, Grid, Double Lot or Dollar Cost Averaging and is only using pure Price Action to determine it’s entry signals. We can also see that the bot uses news information from faireconomy media.

Naturally, the 100% win rate sounds very exciting since a 100% win rate for algorithmic trading strategies is incredibly hard to achieve. So I wanted to take a closer look to see what’s behind this claim and perhaps get a clue how the EA pulls off this trick.

The 100% Success Rate

I’ve seen several vloggers on YouTube claim a 100% win rate for their strategies. However, this can be achieved by manipulating the backtest either by selecting a specific asset, a short backtesting period, or overfitting the strategy parameters to optimize the results.

However, this does not seem to be the case with Advanced Gold Pattern EA since the trader also provided the Live Signal Stats, which basically shows the strategy results for live trading.

From the signal stats, we can see that the bot started trading on 06/30/2022 had 58 trades during this time frame and had indeed a 100% win rate. Although the bot has not been running for a very long time, a win rate for 58 consecutive trades is quite an achievement. Nice!

So I decided to backtest the EA in MetaTrader using tick data to see if the bot results were also profitable over a longer period of time. However, my broker demo account only provided data starting on October 22 for the backtest so I only ended up with a few month of testing.

The backtest results were 14 trades with a 100% win rate and a net profit of 2.29. So I was able to confirm the win rate in my backtest but I wouldn’t quit my day job with those profits.

So how does it work? A wild Guess

As I mentioned before the actual strategy is embedded in the compiled EA binary and kept a secret and since there weren’t any indicators added to the backtest chart it’s not easy to tell how the strategy is implemented.

However, from the how the EA works I think I was able to draw some conclusions of how it pulls up the high win rate. In my view there are a couple of things that seem to matter:

First is the fact that the EA only has been running live for about six months. I’m sure if it continues running for longer, eventually, it will trade with a loss.

Then there is a relatively low number of trades considering the short time interval of 15 minutes. According to the signal stats there were 58 trades in 6 months so about a trade every couple of days. The larger the number of trades, the more difficult it is to pull of a high win rate.

Next, EA does a pretty good job of determining to direction of the price action. Otherwise, this high success rate wouldn’t be possible. From the backtest chart it looks like the EA detects explosive breakouts and there are many ways to do this, e.g. using support/resistance levels, volatility indicators, MAs, etc.

Below you can see a long entry after an explosive upward movement.

The other significant part to achieve the high win rate may be the fact that the EA is quickly updating a trailing stop loss as soon as the price moves in the right direction.

Below you can see a a long entry at $1,645.66. Seconds later, the stop loss was moved up. The trailing stop was continuously updated six times every couple of seconds until the stop loss was triggered 17 seconds later.

By moving the stop loss above the entry price very fast above the entry price, it appears the EA can achieve a high win rate. This may also explain the low profit, since we are also quickly exiting the trade.

I’m sure the actual strategy implementation is a lot more sophisticated but these were the conclusions I was able to draw from the backtest results.