Gold EA martingale: how to spot it in an MT5 report

Read the deal list in the Strategy Tester report: a martingale shows as a short ladder of lot sizes that climbs after each loss and drops back after a win.

• “No martingale, no grid” is a claim, and the Strategy Tester report is where you check it: the deal list shows every entry, its volume and its direction.
• The tell for a martingale is a short ladder of lot sizes that climbs after each loss and drops back after a win. Lots that merely vary are usually risk sizing.
• A narrow gap between equity and balance drawdown is not a clean bill. The deal list comes first, the summary figures second.

Sellers write gold EA no martingale no grid in the listing title because buyers search for it, and prop-firm buyers search for it hardest. The phrase costs nothing to write. What it describes can be checked in about ten minutes, in a file the MetaTrader 5 Strategy Tester produces for any Expert Advisor you can run in it. This guide is that check, and it works the same on any report.

What martingale and grid mean in a report

Two different mechanisms get lumped together, and a report shows them in different places.

A martingale raises the position size after a loss, so that one winning trade recovers the whole losing series. It can do this with one position at a time.

A grid opens more positions as price moves against the first one, at intervals, so several positions are open at once and the average entry keeps improving. A grid may keep every rung the same size, or it may raise the size as it goes, in which case it is both.

Neither is hidden by a good equity curve. Both leave marks in the report, because the report lists every deal.

Check 1: the deal list, and the Volume column

At the foot of an MT5 testing report is the Deals table: Time, Deal, Symbol, Type, Direction, Volume, Price, Order, Commission, Swap, Profit, Balance, Comment. Direction is the one to read first. MQL5 names the values: DEAL_ENTRY_IN is “Entry in” and DEAL_ENTRY_OUT is “Entry out” (MQL5 documentation). Filter to the in deals and read down the Volume column.

What you are looking for is not variation. A risk-sized strategy changes its lot on almost every trade, because the size is worked out from the account and the distance to its exit. What gives a martingale away is a short ladder of repeated sizes, the same handful of values over and over, where the next rung follows a losing close and a winning close sends the size back to the bottom.

Illustration, not taken from any run: entries of 0.10, 0.20, 0.40 and 0.80 lots, each after a loss, then 0.10 again after a win, is a doubling ladder. Entries of 0.10, 0.15, 0.20 and 0.25 after successive losses is the same idea added rather than multiplied. Entries of 0.13, 0.21, 0.09 and 0.17 with no link to the previous result is ordinary risk sizing.

Copy the deals into a spreadsheet, put the previous trade’s Profit beside each new entry’s Volume, and count. If size rises after losses and resets after wins, it is a loss progression, whatever the listing calls it.

Check 2: two positions at once, in one direction

Walk the deal list keeping a running count: add one for each in, subtract one for each out. The highest number that count reaches is the most positions the EA held at once. One means a single-position strategy. Two or more in the same direction, opened while the first was losing, is a grid or a basket.

Illustration, not taken from any run: a buy at 2,400, another at 2,395, a third at 2,390, all still open, then all three closed within the same minute. That is a grid stacking into a falling market and closing the set together.

The visual tester shows the same thing live. Its positions table lists each open position’s Time, Type, Volume and Price (MetaTrader 5 Help), so a stack of buys opened at falling prices is visible as it builds.

Check 3: equity against balance, and why the gap alone proves little

The tester’s help defines the pair: “Balance — amount of money on the account, the results of currently open positions are not included”, and “Equity — the amount of money taking into account the results of the currently open positions” (MetaTrader 5 Help). A basket carrying open losses drags equity down while balance stays flat, and the report records both: Equity Drawdown Maximal is the “difference in deposit currency between the highest local equity value and the next lowest equity value” (MetaTrader 5 Help), with a balance version beside it.

A wide gap between the two drawdowns is a flag. A narrow one is not a clean bill: a basket that closes its positions quickly can show a small gap, and a single-position strategy that holds through a deep pullback can show a large one. The gap measures open losses carried, not how they were built. That is why the deal list comes first.

Check 4: win rate against average loss

The summary block gives Profit Trades, Average profit trade and Average loss trade. A loss progression tends to produce a high win rate and an average loss several times the average win, because the ladder converts most losing series into one small winner and saves the damage for the series it cannot rescue.

Illustration, not taken from any run: nine trades in ten winning, an average win of 100 and an average loss of 500 is that shape. Four in ten winning, with winners half again as large as losers, is the opposite shape, the one a breakout or a trend-follower produces. Neither is good or bad on its own; they are different bets, and the first one is the shape to ask about.

Run the checks yourself

Every live Product on the strategies page has a free Backtest Edition that runs inside the Strategy Tester on your own broker’s ticks, and its report carries the full deal list. Read any report this way, ours included: the backtest report linked from each strategy page is a place to practise reading the summary block before you open a deal list of your own. The field-by-field reading is in how to read a backtest report.

Before you act on any of this

This guide quotes no result: the numbers in it are illustrations, not taken from any run. Every figure on this site comes from the MetaTrader 5 Strategy Tester, never from live trading, and no result is promised anywhere on it. On the IC Markets demo data our runs use, the tester charged no commission on XAUUSD, while real trading on that account cost roughly $7 per lot round-turn, and fills are modelled rather than executed. Before you rely on any strategy that adds to losing trades, read the risk disclosure.