Weekly Breakout Forex Expert Advisor trades in the direction of a breakout from a previous week's range. It uses the Low of the previous week as the stop loss for its buy orders, and it uses High of the previous week as the stop loss level for its sell orders. If the new week starts within the previous week's trading range, the EA uses two pending stop orders to implement its strategy. They will expire at the end of the week if not triggered.

If the week starts outside the previous week's range (there was a weekend gap in price), the Expert Advisor will buy or sell the currency pair immediately and will also set up a pending order for the opposite trade. Weekly Breakout does not use take profit level. If stop loss is not triggered during the week, the position is closed when the next week starts.

The Expert Advisor is available for both metaTrader 4 and metaTrader 5. It was backtested only in metaTrader 5 because metaTrader 4 does not allow backtesting on Weekly timeframe.

Backtest

The backtest of Weekly Breakout metaTrader Expert Advisor on the 13-year period has shown the following results with W1 chart of GBPUSD currency pair and 0.1 standard lot volume per position: $5,256 net profit on $10,000 starting account with a maximum relative drawdown at 19.91%. A little more than a half of its trades were winning, while the average profit was somewhat greater than the average loss. Unfortunately, the balance curve was not rising consistently.

Examples

As you can see, there are weeks with a closing deal only (inside bar), with no trades at all (inside bar after an inside bar), with one entry trade (common breakout week), and with two entry trades (double breakout week).

MiniFAQ

What are the stop loss and take profit used by this EA?

• The stop loss is calculated before entering a trade. During the backtest, the average loss was about 100 pips.

How often does it trade?

• Due to the nature of its strategy, the EA trades only once or twice per week.

What other currency pairs did it show profit with?

• USDJPY and USDCHF backtests have also been profitable with the default settings of this EA.

This EA is ECN compatible. You must set ECN_Mode input parameter to true in order to enable ECN compatibility for this Expert Advisor. Otherwise, you will most likely be seeing OrderSend Error 130 messages when EA will be trying to open positions. This is because, if you are trading with an ECN broker (with market execution for orders), you cannot set SL/TP on position opening. You have to open a position first without SL/TP and only then modify it adding stop loss and/or take profit level.