Buying a gold expert advisor for MT5? 5 questions to ask first

Gold expert advisors are sold with screenshots of near-perfect equity curves. Before you trust one with real money, ask five questions. A serious seller can answer all of them.

1. Was it tested with realistic costs?

A backtest without realistic spread, commission and slippage flatters every strategy. Slippage is the difference between a backtest and reality. Ask what spread was assumed and what happens to the results when it widens.

2. Was it tested on data it was never tuned on?

A system with dozens of tuned settings can describe the past perfectly and predict nothing. Ask for out-of-sample and walk-forward results: performance on a period that was kept aside while the rules were built.

3. What was the worst drawdown, and how long did recovery take?

Return alone says little. A 50% drawdown needs a 100% gain just to get back to the start. Ask for the maximum drawdown, how long it lasted, and how the results behave across different market regimes.

4. Does it use martingale, grid or averaging into losers?

These techniques produce smooth curves until one bad move wipes out months of gains. Ask directly. If the answer is unclear, treat it as yes.

5. Is there a public record, losing days included?

A handful of trades proves nothing either way. Look for a record of hundreds of trades, across quiet and volatile periods, that shows the losing days too. Then start on a demo account for a full market cycle before risking money.

Our own answers

Trade Routes publishes a forward-test record and a backtest run on the unmodified strategy code with a 25-point spread, where a candle that could hit both stop and target is counted as a loss. We do not use martingale, grid recovery, averaging into losers or hidden stop removal. You can read the record on our Transparency page.