The Crew

XAUUSD · M1 · MetaTrader 5 Expert Advisor

Coming soon. This Expert Advisor is in final testing and is not for sale yet. Its description, manual and research are published so you can follow it before release.

Read the manualHow it was built

Headline backtest

Profit factor 4.42 · worst equity drawdown 6.5% · 627 trades · return +75.7% on 10,000

Backtest, real ticks, Pepperstone, 2025-07-01 to 2026-09-07, version 2.83. The weakest of the live brokers tested, not the strongest.

Figures on this page come from the MetaTrader 5 Strategy Tester on real broker ticks. They are backtests, not live results.

The Crew is an MT5 Expert Advisor for gold (XAUUSD): eleven session-timed strategies run a shared equal-lot recovery grid under one account-level risk warden.

Eleven specialists, one warden

There is an old idea in markets that one method should work at every hour of the day. Anyone who has watched gold trade at three in the morning and again at nine knows better. The Asian hours breathe slowly. London opens like a door thrown wide. The last hour of the American session has a character of its own that nothing else in the day shares.

So this expert does not send one method into all of them. It runs eleven, each built for one window and no other, under one warden who is not one of the eleven and who outranks all of them.

The warden keeps the ledger for the whole book. She decides who may open at all, refuses any specialist the moment the book is carrying more than it should, and closes the whole house down if the account falls further than the configured limit. None of the eleven can overrule her.

Below her, the eleven, by temperament: Nadia and Nerissa and Nova work the quiet night hours on different time horizons. Amara works before the Western session stirs and carries the deepest reserves. Selene and Thea hold the hours either side of midnight (neither ships in a validated roster yet - see Settings). Imogen goes through the London open with the crowd; Cassandra leans against it. Clara works the long European morning. Juno takes the hours where Europe and America overlap. Evelyn steps in as the American session closes out its business.

How it trades

Each specialist waits for its own hour, its own conditions, and takes at most one position per day. When a position does not reach its small target quickly, an equal-lot recovery ladder averages the entry and exits the whole group as one. There is no martingale: every rung of the ladder is the same size as the first, and each specialist has a fixed maximum number of rungs, so the ladder's depth is a design constant, not a surprise.

There is no per-trade stop loss. Protection is at the account level: a free-margin guard on new positions (existing recovery ladders are never blocked), a per-direction exposure cap across the whole book, and a hard flatten once the account's floating loss passes the percentage below its peak that the user sets.

Three of the eleven specialists can want the same hour and the same direction. A fixed priority order decides which one takes a contested moment, so the book behaves the same way on every run; this makes behaviour predictable, it is not offered as a risk control.

What it does not do

No martingale or lot escalation inside a recovery: every layer is the same size as the one before it. No per-trade stop loss - the account-level breaker is the only brake. No news calendar logic, no grid depth guessing based on volatility, no DLL imports and no custom includes. No licensing or account-locking code.

Settings

Twelve inputs. Everything else - each specialist's own hour, gate, ladder spacing and depth - is fixed at the value it was validated on, because the parts interlock: moving one without the others produces a configuration that was never tested.

• Roster - how many of the eleven specialists trade. Balanced 6 is the shipped default; a wider roster puts more of the eleven to work across more hours, and both the money made and the floating exposure grow together (see the manual for the measured figures).
• Broker clock shift - the one setting a user must get right. The specialists are calibrated to market hours on a server at GMT+2 (winter) / GMT+3 (summer). Check the line the EA prints in the journal at start-up and set this if the broker's server clock differs.
• Risk tier - how much floating exposure the book is allowed to budget for, as a share of the balance. Conservative is the shipped default. Fixed lot is available for a user who prefers to size by hand.
• Broker profile - selects which measured reference table the position sizing divides by; worst floating exposure at a fixed lot is a property of the broker's feed, not only of the strategy (see Results below).
• Sizing policy - Automatic adapts the validated configuration to the account; Exact uses the user's own numbers and lets the broker decline what it cannot carry rather than silently trading something smaller.
• Protection - the account-level loss limit and how long a breach must persist before it fires, the maximum spread accepted, a hard lot cap, and whether the end-of-run risk report is printed.

Results

Backtest, MetaTrader 5 Strategy Tester, real ticks, 100 percent history quality, XAUUSD, 2025-07-01 to 2026-09-07, 10,000 starting balance, compiled defaults (Roster Balanced 6, Risk tier Conservative), measured on build 2.83. The shipped 2.84 build was verified behaviour-identical to 2.83 by a trade-for-trade parity test on the same feed and window (identical deal count, profit matched to the cent). These are backtest figures; nothing below is from a live account.

The same configuration takes near-identical trades on every broker and earns different money on each: results differ by broker, and a demo feed is not a substitute for testing on the broker a user intends to trade with.

Frequently asked questions

Q: Which broker and account type does The Crew need? A: A hedging account, on XAUUSD (any broker spelling: XAUUSD, XAUUSD+, XAUUSD-ECN, GOLD.pro) with reasonable gold spreads.

Q: What is the minimum deposit? A: Validated at 10,000 in account currency. The EA never refuses a smaller account - it narrows the roster to what the balance can carry instead.

Q: Which chart and timeframe do I attach it to? A: Any timeframe - The Crew runs its own internal one-minute clock, so the chart period does not matter.

Q: Which setting is the main risk decision, and where should I start? A: Roster - how many of the eleven specialists trade. Balanced 6 at the Conservative risk tier is the shipped default and the recommended start.

Q: Does The Crew use a grid, and is it martingale? A: It is an equal-lot recovery grid: a position that misses its small target is averaged by a ladder of same-sized layers, closed as one group. No martingale - every layer matches the first, and each specialist has a fixed maximum depth.

Q: Why does it hold floating losses instead of using a stop loss? A: There is no per-trade stop loss; the recovery ladder is the exit mechanism, so open positions can float in loss while a group recovers. Protection is account-level: a free-margin guard on new positions, a per-direction exposure cap, and a hard flatten once floating loss passes the peak-to-trough percentage the user sets.

Q: Do I need a VPS? A: A VPS or an always-on computer is recommended - the specialists work through the night and the account breaker needs the EA running to act.

Q: Can I backtest The Crew myself? A: Yes. It is one self-contained Expert Advisor with no DLLs or custom includes, so it runs in the MetaTrader 5 Strategy Tester on real ticks; use the feed, window and starting balance in the Results section above to reproduce a figure.

Requirements

XAUUSD (gold), a hedging account. Any chart timeframe - the EA keeps its own internal clock. A broker with reasonable gold spreads; the EA skips entries above a configurable spread ceiling. A VPS or an always-on computer is recommended, because the specialists work through the night.

Risk disclosure

Trading leveraged instruments carries a substantial risk of loss. This is a grid strategy without a per-trade stop loss: it holds losing positions through adverse moves by design and recovers them by adding equal-sized layers, which exposes the account to open-ended floating loss during a sustained adverse move. The only brake is an account-level breaker that flattens everything and realises the loss it was holding.

The results above come from a period in which gold rose. A sustained decline is the condition this design has the least evidence about, because it has not faced a full one in the tested history. Worst-case floating exposure at a fixed 0.01 lot varies by broker feed - see the manual for the measured range and the sizing guidance by account balance. Past backtest performance does not predict future outcomes. Test on a demo account first, long enough to see a recovery ladder open, deepen and close, before funding a live account.

#property description (for the .mq5, a few lines)

THE CREW - eleven session specialists on XAUUSD under one risk warden.
Equal-lot recovery, fixed ladder depth, account-level drawdown breaker.
Hedging account. Twelve inputs; strategy internals fixed at validated values.
Backtest only. Worst-case floating exposure at 0.01 lots varies by broker
feed; see the description and the manual for the measured range.

Pre-submission checklist

• [x] No DLL imports, no custom includes (single self-contained .mq5)
• [x] No licensing/account-locking code
• [x] No award, championship or certificate references anywhere in the copy
• [x] No profit promise, no superlatives, no money imagery
• [x] Backtest figures labelled as backtest, with broker, window and history quality
• [x] English only, no emojis, no external links
• [x] Twelve inputs, English names and comments
• [ ] 3 logo PNGs exported (200x200, 140x140, 60x60)
• [ ] Screenshots exported and cropped to the list below
• [ ] #property link set once the product URL exists
• [ ] Validator pass: arbitrary symbol/timeframe, tiny deposit, Errors-only journal empty

Evidence