← Daybreak

DAYBREAK — user manual

Version 1.01 · XAUUSD · MetaTrader 5

What changed in version 1.01 - panel, chart labels, restart-safe

• Trades identical to 1.00 (proved deal for deal; see the MANIFEST).
• A restart no longer re-arms a level that already traded today. The day's levels and their state, the range gate of the day and the highest (lowest) price the trail has followed are saved on the account and re-read. With a restart every hour of a backtest, 1.00 traded 281 times instead of 155.
• Clearer journal. When you edit a section 6 or 7 input but run the Recommended profile, or a Custom sizing input under a named risk level, the start lines say those inputs are not in force. The smallest order's margin is printed at the start; when even the minimum lot does not fit, the panel says so.
• A control panel and chart labels (below). Three buttons: the levels are set once a day, so there are no resting orders to refresh.

The panel and the chart (since 1.01)

A small panel in the top-left corner shows what the EA is doing, and the chart labels every level it waits at, every open trade's exit and every closed trade's result. Nothing is drawn in a plain Strategy Tester run; on a live chart and in the visual tester it refreshes every second. Inputs: InpPanel, InpDrawTrades, InpCleanChart (hides the grid while the EA runs and puts it back when it is removed), InpTextSize.

3 buttons. Every action is sent by the EA itself and written to the Experts tab; a panel close carries the comment "... panel close". The second-click buttons need the same button again within 5 seconds.

On the chart: yesterday's high and low while they are live, as dotted lines labelled with the trigger price a break fires at; the open trade's trail start or current trail price. A closed trade shows as a dotted line from its entry to its exit, labelled with why it closed and its net result.

1. What it does, in plain words

DAYBREAK watches two prices every trading day: the high and the low of the previous day. If price breaks up through yesterday's high, it buys; if price breaks down through yesterday's low, it sells. Only one of those can happen per day per side, and only after the day's first M15 bar has closed — a level the market already passed before that bar closed is skipped for the day, because a break that already happened before the EA could see it is not a signal.

Every position carries a stop loss and a take profit measured from the level, not from the price you actually got filled at, so the risk on the trade is the same distance whatever the slippage was. Once the trade is far enough ahead, a trailing stop takes over and gives back only a fixed amount from the best price seen.

DAYBREAK holds at most one position at a time. There is no grid, no martingale, no averaging into a loser — every position stands on its own stop loss.

It skips new entries (not existing positions) on the day of a US jobs report, a Federal Reserve rate decision, and the few thinly-traded days around the year-end close. It also skips new entries on a day whose prior 24 hours moved too little — unless the break reaches into price nobody has traded in five days, which is let through on its own.

2. Installation (five minutes)

1. Attach DAYBREAK to a gold chart (XAUUSD, XAUUSDp, GOLD.pro or your broker's spelling — any timeframe; the strategy reads the daily and M15 bars itself).
2. Leave every input at its default. That default is the validated configuration.
3. Set Risk level (section "1. Start here") to match your comfort: Low, Medium (default) or High.
4. Allow algo trading, drag it onto the chart, done.

2a. The inputs at a glance

3. The only setting that matters: risk level

InpRisk sizes every trade as a percent of your account balance, per the trade's own stop distance. Figures: backtest, MetaTrader 5 Strategy Tester, real ticks, Low / Medium / High risk arms, BlackBull, 2025.01.02 → 2026.09.25, $10,000 deposit, fixed 250 ms execution delay, compounding.

Higher risk grows the account faster and draws down harder. Medium is the validated default — raise it only if you have sat through the Low/Medium curves and are comfortable with the shape.

Custom sizing

Set Risk level = Custom, then either: - Risk percent — your own % of balance per stop, in "Custom risk %, per stop", or - Fixed lot — set "Custom sizing method" to Fixed lot and give the lot size in "Custom fixed lot".

3a. Prop-firm accounts: one choice

"Account type" (section 1) has three settings:

• Personal — sizing follows Risk level exactly as above.
• Prop firm 2-step / Prop firm 1-step — fills in a daily-loss and maximum-loss guard (5%/10% for a 2-step challenge, 3%/6% for a 1-step one) if you leave the prop-rule percentages at 0. Set your own firm's numbers in section 3 to override them.

3b. Prop-firm rules: your firm's own numbers

All zero by default (off). Fill in only the ones your firm actually enforces:

• Daily loss limit % — closes everything and pauses until the firm's next day.
• Maximum loss limit % — closes everything and stops trading on this login for good.
• Profit target % — closes everything and stops (celebrate).
• Best-day cap % — closes everything and pauses until the next day (a firm that caps a single day's gain).
• Safety % — the EA acts this many percent before each limit, so a fast candle can't jump straight through a hard limit unmanaged.

3c. Losing runs: what to expect

Losses come in runs. In the backtests behind the risk table, five to seven consecutive stop-outs occurred about once a year (October 2025 and September 2026 in the 2025-2026 window). Each stop-out costs about one risk unit, so such a run costs roughly 3% at Low, 7-11% at Medium and 12-20% at High, depending on the broker's tick stream. No filter tested could tell these days from the profitable ones in advance; the risk level is the control. Pick the level whose run you can sit through.

4. Your first week

Watch the Experts log. On load you will see one banner line naming the account type, profile, risk level, sides, calendar skips, the range-gate floor and its status, margin-fit and jump-skip, and a second line with every bracket distance. A broker-profile line follows with your computed lot and its risk in account currency and percent.

5. Reading the chart and the journal

DAYBREAK does not draw objects on the chart. The journal prints: - DAYBREAK: entries held for <reason> — a calendar-day skip or a closed range gate. - DAYBREAK: lot reduced X -> Y to fit N% of free margin — the margin-fit sizer at work. - DAYBREAK: the buy/sell level was skipped - price had already jumped past the trigger — the jump-skip rule. - DAYBREAK: order admitted under the 5-day-zone rule — a trade the range gate would otherwise have held, let through because it broke into fresh five-day territory.

6. When it does not trade — and why that is usually right

Two levels a day, at most one trade each, only after the day's first M15 bar closes. Most days do not qualify: the level may already be behind price at the open (gapped over), the day's range may sit below the floor, or a calendar skip may be active. This is normal — the strategy trades roughly two handfuls of times a month, not every day.

7. Exit mechanics

• Stop loss / take profit are set the moment the trade opens, both measured from the level.
• Trailing stop arms once profit clears the arm distance, then either locks a fraction of the excursion (Proportional mode) or trails a fixed distance behind the best price (Fixed mode, the validated default). "Never below entry" (off by default) floors the trail at exact breakeven once either mode has armed.

8. Execution quality — what your broker adds

DAYBREAK sends a market order the instant a level breaks — not a resting pending order — so your broker's fill speed and slippage matter. A tight-spread, fast-fill broker gets you a fill closer to the level; a wide-spread broker gives back part of the edge to the spread itself, same as any breakout system.

9. Sizing and margin

Every risk level is capped by "Margin fit %" (default 95, always on): if the risk-sized lot would need more margin than that share of your free margin, the lot is shrunk to what fits, never refused outright. Gold on many brokers margins at 1:20 for a retail account whatever your account leverage — this is why High risk's real-world return is well below twice Medium's return.

10. Optimising (for advanced users)

Every input is exposed for research and GA use, but the compiled defaults ARE the validated configuration. Changing a [Custom] input without setting Settings profile = Custom does nothing — that is the point of the facade (see _proofs/PROOFS.md).

11. What is saved and what is not

Prop-firm rule state (daily/maximum-loss anchors) persists across a restart on a live or demo account via terminal global variables; the Strategy Tester always starts fresh. Nothing else is saved.

12. Troubleshooting

• No trades for weeks — normal; check the journal for "entries held" lines before assuming a problem.
• Lot smaller than expected — the margin-fit sizer shrank it; the journal names the reason.
• "the broker's minimum stop distance... the bracket will be rejected" — printed once at start if your broker's STOPS_LEVEL is wider than the $ stop; contact your broker about a tighter minimum or use a wider custom stop.

13. Final checklist and disclaimer

Backtest figures throughout this manual are MetaTrader 5 Strategy Tester runs on real broker ticks, labelled with their feed and window. They are not a promise of future results. Past performance, including in a backtest, does not guarantee future performance.

14. Reproduce the tests yourself

Every figure in this manual comes with the settings that produced it. Reproducing one takes a few minutes in MetaTrader 5 and needs no .set file.

By hand, in MetaTrader 5 (the BlackBull Medium row; open the Strategy Tester with Ctrl+R):

Expect 140 trades, net about +52.9 %, profit factor 2.49 and a maximum equity drawdown of 4.23 % (backtest, Medium risk, BlackBull, 2025.01.02 to 2026.09.25). On another broker the trade list is the same to the second and the profit differs: the trailing stop lives longer on some tick streams than on others, which is why this manual quotes three brokers, never one.

Complete reference — every input, its set-file key and default

Generated from the compiled source; enum defaults are the source names - the Inputs tab shows their plain labels. The presets in presets/ are complete sets of these inputs (UTF-16 LE with BOM, every enum as its integer).