Horizon · Strategy dossier
A breakout system that rests twelve stop orders just inside the edges of four Donchian channels, sizes every distance as a percentage of yesterday's close, and then manages every fill identically — so most trades exit on a trailing stop rather than at the target they were given.
One number sets the scale of the entire system. Nothing is expressed in dollars or pips.
On gold at $4,400 that makes S = $22. Level offsets, stop distances, targets, break-even triggers and trailing gaps are all multiples of S. The consequence is that the EA rescaled itself automatically as gold went from $1,800 to $4,400 without a single setting being touched.
S tracks price, not volatility. In a quiet year the same multiples are far too wide, which is the leading explanation for why 2021–22 were flat-to-negative while 2024–26 were strong. Gold's range measured in S roughly doubled across those two halves.
A Donchian channel is just the highest high and lowest low of the last N hours, taken on completed H1 bars. The EA runs four of them at once.
It does not wait for the breakout — it front-runs it. With kBuy = −0.149
the buy stop sits 0.149·S below the channel high. On gold that is roughly $3 early. You are
filled just before the channel actually breaks, which is the single most distinctive thing about
the entry model.
The twelve strategies do not each get their own channel. They share four, and the difference between a "slow" and a "fast" strategy is which of these it reads.
| Group | Lookback | In days | Strategies | Character |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| A | 1350 h | 56.2 | 0, 3, 5, 8 | Eight-week channel. Rarely moves; a break is a genuine multi-month high. |
| B | 162 h | 6.8 | 1, 2, 4, 6, 7 | One-week channel. The bulk of the book. |
| C | 89 h | 3.7 | 9 | Half-week. |
| D | 17 h | 0.7 | 10, 11 | Under a day. Fires constantly, tiny edge per trade. |
Each has a fixed stop and target in S, and a fixed lot weight. The weights and distances were fitted from 66,921 of the vendor EA's own orders — they are calibration constants, not preferences.
| # | Group | Channel | kBuy | SL (S) | TP (S) | R:R | Lot wt | Profile |
|---|
The mix is deliberate. Strategy 3 risks 1.00 S to make 4.09 S. Strategy 7 risks 4.58 S to make 0.67 S — it wins around 90% of the time and loses badly when it loses. Blending runners and scalpers on the same channels is what produces an ~87% win rate at a profit factor of only 1.4–2.0. It is twelve bets on four channels, not twelve independent systems.
The stop and target you see on the order are mostly theatre. A flat trailing rule takes over almost immediately and does the actual work.
level − SL_S·S, target at
level + TP_S·S, both fixed per strategy.entry + 0.10 S — a small profit is locked. This distance is the same for all twelve
strategies, not scaled to each one's target.These rules were reconstructed from 3,561 "position modified" events in the vendor EA's own journal, then confirmed across 15,044 trades. The exit mix that produces:
Every pending order is cancelled at 23:45 broker time and re-armed 80 minutes
later, at 01:05. Copied from the vendor's ScheduledClose. It prevents stale levels
triggering on the illiquid rollover.
While a position is open on one side, that side's level is re-armed at the same price rather than recomputed. Measured from the vendor: 56% of re-arms after a fill are at an identical price, median 4.5 minutes later.
A rolling channel can drop a level onto the market and fill instantly — observed live at 15:00:00.247. A breakout must trigger because price rose to the level, never because the level fell to price.
Lots are per-strategy weights × one global multiplier, and do not grow with the account. Any strategy whose lot rounds below the broker minimum is silently dropped — which is why small accounts quietly stop running half the book.
At a $2,600 balance with the shipped weights, strategies 1, 7, 8 and 10 fall under the lot floor and never trade — 8,141 of the vendor's 15,061 trades, 54% of the book. The account looks like it is running the strategy, and is running half of it.
Real ticks, XAUUSD, $10,000 deposit, one independent run per year. Two configurations: the full book, and the four-strategy Group A subset ("V8").
| Year | All 12 | DD | V8 (0,3,5,8) | DD |
|---|
The full book returns roughly 3.2× what the four-strategy subset does, at roughly 3× the drawdown — and its losing years are much worse (−17.4% against −3.7%). Cross-strategy correlation of yearly P&L is 0.96, with 64 of 66 pairs above 0.90: the twelve are one bet expressed twelve ways. Selecting a "best" subset on early years and testing it on later ones underperforms simply running all twelve.