REGULATOR — Break & Retest Log

The short version

This is a trading program that watches six markets — gold, two currency pairs and the three big US stock indices — and takes a specific kind of trade automatically. This page is its diary: every setup it looked at, and why it did or did not take it.

The trade it looks for

Prices tend to stall at particular levels — places where the market has turned before. The program finds those levels by itself, on the four-hourly chart, with no lines drawn by hand, and then watches the 15-minute chart for the trade.

Then it waits for three things in order. Price has to break through a level and close beyond it. It has to travel away, so a brief poke through does not count. And then it has to come back and touch that level again and hold. That last part is the retest, and it is the whole idea: a level that used to stop price should now support it from the other side.

Why most setups are refused

⭐ This is the part worth understanding, because it is most of what you will see here. A setup can look perfect and still be declined — the spread is too wide that second, a high-impact news release is minutes away, the trade would be against the bigger trend, a position is already open, or the level simply is not good enough.

Every refusal is written down with its reason. A strategy is defined as much by what it declines as by what it takes, and a filter nobody can see is a filter nobody can improve.

What happens once it is in

It risks half a percent of the account on each trade, and never guesses the size — it is calculated from the distance to the stop-loss.

When the trade is up by the amount it originally risked, it banks a third. The remainder runs for twice the risk. The stop does not move.

⭐ The break-even move is switched off, and that was a finding. On fourteen months of history it lifted the win rate from 34% to 48% and cost about 12R: it turned losers into scratches, which flatters the win rate, while cutting short the few large winners the shape depends on. Win rate is exactly the number a break-even rule is built to improve, and it is the number that fooled us for a day. ⚠ A win rate on this page that looks low is the rule working, not failing — at a 2:1 target the break-even point is about 33%.

⚠ What this does not claim

It is running on a demo account, not real money. The numbers on this page are from a handful of trades, which is far too few to say whether the strategy makes money.

⛔ Measured properly, it has no demonstrated edge. Over 27 months and 357 trades the edge before costs is zero — and costs are about −0.03R a trade, so the account loses at roughly the price of trading. Seven configurations in a row looked good on the data they were chosen on and reversed on data they had not seen. ⭐ The one encouraging finding is that the raw signal, before costs, is slightly positive on every instrument tested: the problem is that trading it costs more than it is worth, and cost is a property of instrument, timeframe and stop width — all three choosable.

The point of all this machinery is not to prove it works. It is to make the thing answerable: when there are enough trades to judge, the answer will come from a record rather than a feeling.

Reading the page

Right now is live state. The record is the totals. The pack breaks it down per instrument. R means multiples of what was risked — a trade that makes 1R made exactly what it stood to lose.