Gold EA settings: four inputs and a sealed Profile

XauStack’s gold EAs expose four inputs, a Profile selector among them, and every tuned value is sealed into the build as a named Profile, so the shipped presets select a configuration rather than edit one.

• We do ship .set presets in the download — one per Profile — but not a folder of tunable thresholds per risk tier.
• Each Product exposes four inputs: a Profile selector, one sizing input, a magic number and a comment.
• Everything else was fixed when the build was compiled, which is one fewer way your run and ours can disagree.

What you were expecting to find

You searched for gold EA settings, or for a recommended set file for a gold EA, and expected a zip: a folder of .set files, one per aggression level, refreshed every quarter under a new post. On the desk’s own read of the results for that term, that is what most of the first page hands you, and it has trained most buyers to expect it.

So here is the correction. We do ship .set presets: they are in the download, and install.ps1 copies them into MQL5/Presets for you. What they are not is a tier folder. Each preset carries the values of a Profile the Product already ships, so loading one selects a configuration that is already inside the binary. The tuned values themselves are not exposed as inputs, so there is no folder of thresholds to hand you and none to re-publish next quarter.

What a .set file actually is

Most of the pages ranking for what is a .set file MT5 hand the files over without ever saying what they are, so: a .set file is a serialisation of the Inputs tab, and nothing more.

Attach an Expert Advisor to a chart, or open it in the Strategy Tester, and its properties dialog has an Inputs tab listing every input the author exposed, with two buttons at the bottom. MetaQuotes’ own help: “You can use the ‘Save’ button to save the current set of parameters and the ‘Load’ button to load a previously saved set. Sets of input parameters are stored in the /Presets folder of the trading platform” (MetaTrader 5 Help).

That is the whole mechanism. A .set is name-and-value pairs belonging to one build of one Expert Advisor, and the pairs are matched by parameter name, so a file saved from a different EA sets only the inputs whose names line up and leaves the rest at whatever they already were.

What a Profile is here

A Profile is one named parameter set a Product ships and a buyer selects from the Profile input. The Preset is the .set file carrying the identical values into the Strategy Tester, and exactly one Profile of a Product is its default. The Profile is the named set of values; the Preset is the file.

The distinction matters because the backtest guide tells you to load the preset that shipped with the download before you run anything: a run on the defaults is a run of a different strategy, and that is the commonest reason a report looks nothing like the published one.

Four inputs, and where the rest of the values live

What a Product exposes is four things: the Profile selector, one sizing input, a magic number so MetaTrader 5 can tell this EA’s positions from another’s, and an order comment.

Everything else is compiled in. Every tuned value belongs to a Profile, and the Profiles are sealed into the build: you can select one, but you cannot open it and edit what is inside.

That is why a Profile is described in words rather than numbers. Helix Trail’s Standard Profile, in the catalogue’s summary, is “The settings the published run on the strategy page was checked with; the only set this Version ships.” You choose a tested configuration by name, not assemble one from parts.

What each Product ships

Three Products ship more than one Profile; one of them ships three.

• Helix Basket — Standard (default) and Light.
• Aurum Recoil — Steady (default), Balanced and Deep Margin.
• Reclaim — Runner (default) and Steady.
• Meridian Trend, Helix Trail and Dawnbreak — one Profile each, named Standard, and it is the default.

Deep Margin carries a written warning in the catalogue, carried here in full rather than summarised: “The desk’s multi-year study of this configuration on a $25,000 account ended in account loss in 2023, in 2024 and in 2025; only the 2026 window is published here. Read the Deep Margin note before you consider it.”

What sealing does and does not remove

A vendor who exposes twenty editable inputs has shipped twenty ways for your run to diverge from the published one. Fewer exposed values means fewer of those ways. That is the entire claim, and it is not a claim that the two runs are alike.

They are not. Every published XauStack figure comes from the Strategy Tester on ICMarketsSC-Demo ticks at History Quality 63 %, with January to April synthesised from M1 bars; the two departures — no commission charged, fills modelled — apply to our run and not to your broker; and you choose the broker, deposit, spread and window. Drawdown in dollars moves with the deposit and the size you choose, so the same trades can read very differently on your account.

The true statement is narrow: sealing removes one source of divergence, the parameter set. Your run matches ours in its configuration and in nothing else. Read the risk disclosure before treating any of it as evidence.

What is still yours to change

Plenty: the broker, the deposit, the symbol spelling, the test window, which Profile you select — and the sizing input every Product exposes.

The section above names the four inputs by role rather than by identifier, because the name differs from one Product to the next. You will see it in the Inputs tab when you attach the EA or set up a tester run; the Profile selector, the magic number and the comment sit beside it.

That input is a real lever. It is why Meridian Trend’s catalogue line reads “Prop-firm evaluations: lower the risk per trade first”, and why the prop-firm guide can tell you to lower it. We publish no default value for any of them: name the input, run it, read your own report. What is not yours to change is the inside of a Profile.

Before you act on any of this

Every figure XauStack publishes comes from the MetaTrader 5 Strategy Tester, never from live trading, and no result is promised anywhere on this site. The risk disclosure sets out the limits. For the licensing half of what arrives in the zip, see what an account-locked build is; for where the .set presets land, see installing an Expert Advisor.