Bullion Horizon on a funded account

How it decides, and how it trades

The signal is a score out of four, taken once per closed H1 bar. Trend: the close above the 20-bar average, which is above the 50-bar average, or the mirror of that for sells. RSI: below the oversold level for a buy, above the overbought level for a sell. Cycle: the close against the close twenty bars back. Price action: higher highs with higher lows, or the reverse. Minimum Confluence Score decides how many of the four must agree, from one to four; a fifth control, Min H1 ATR for entry, refuses a signal when the hour's range is too small to be worth trading.

What happens after the signal depends on the risk mode. In the grid modes the first ticket opens at 0.01 lot, another is added every 500 points against the move, each 0.01 lot larger than the last, up to eight per side, and the side is closed together when its open profit reaches 100 USD. In the Low Risk mode there is one ticket at a time with a hard stop and a hard target in points, sized either as a percent of equity or as a fixed lot. The single-ticket mode is the one a rulebook can live with.

On top of either mode sit the protections: a basket stop in percent of balance, a trailing stop, a timed close of everything at one clock time, a spread cap, a trading window per weekday in the clock you choose, and a news filter that opens nothing from sixty minutes before to sixty minutes after a high-impact USD or EUR event. A dashboard on the chart shows the time, symbol and spread, the risk mode and preset in use, tickets per side with their average entries, open profit, drawdown, balance and equity, the last signal with its four scores, the status, and the next news event. Sixty-seven parameters in ten groups; nothing is hidden behind a hard-coded value.

Why the shipped configuration is not the one for a funded account

The published backtest of the shipped grid returned 167.4 % over 27 February to 21 September 2026 with a maximum balance drawdown of 6.9 %. The number that matters to a firm is the other one: the maximum equity drawdown of that same run was 30.0 %. A grid carries its losing legs open until the basket target is reached, so the loss a firm's dashboard sees is the floating one, and 30 % breaks the total limit of almost every programme and the daily limit of many. On the Store's own trading-profile form, the box that says the product meets prop firm rules is left unticked for exactly this reason.

There is a harder version of the same point. Started on 1 January 2026 instead, three weeks before the published window begins, the same settings met the January gold rally, held eight sell tickets against it, and lost the account in both platforms' testers. That is the shape of a grid without a floor: not a tail risk that shows up in a good window, but the mechanism itself.

The preset built for rule-limited accounts

Low Drawdown Gold H1 is one of the eight entries in the first parameter, and selecting it changes every trading input at start. One ticket at a time, 1 % of equity at risk, stop 2000 and target 1000 points, a trailing stop of 800 points moving in 100-point steps, RSI 35/65, a minimum confluence score of 3, an ATR floor of 2, and trading only from 01:00 to 10:00 on server time. No grid, no ladder, no averaging down: one position, with its stop attached at the broker.

Its measured behaviour, in cTrader's own backtester on real tick data, XAUUSD H1, 10,000 USD, leverage 1:100, each window run twice - once without commission and once at 27.5 USD per million USD of volume:

Six runs, three windows, commission on and off: the worst maximum equity drawdown of the six is 8.7 %, and the worst fall from a day's first hourly reading to that day's lowest is 2.8 %. Those are the two numbers a two-line rulebook asks about, and they are why this preset is the one named here. They are also modest returns, measured over years, on a configuration that trades a nine-hour window and takes one position at a time. A grid's headline number and a rule-limited preset's number are not the same kind of number, and this page does not present them as if they were.

Prop Firm No Grid, the preset whose name suggests it, is the fixed-lot variant: 0.1 lot, XAUUSD only, FIFO on, stop 500 and target 750 points. It is included because the original ships it, and it is only honest to say what the same battery found: with commission applied it was negative on all three windows, and on the longest one its drawdown went past 35 %. Look at Low Drawdown Gold H1 first.

Which rule maps onto which setting

Every limit in the list on the cBots page maps onto a control in this cBot's own panel, by its own name:

Set your floor before you start

One default deserves its own paragraph. Stop loss % ships at 100, and at 100 it is off: any value at or above 100 disables it. That is the original's factory value, kept so that the shipped configuration is the configuration that was tested and published, but it means a fresh instance has no basket floor until you give it one. On a rule-limited account, set it below your firm's total limit with room to spare, and set Closing All Orders with a Closing Time inside your firm's day so that nothing is carried across the reset. The dashboard's drawdown row turns red above 20 %, which is a warning, not a stop.

Setting it up on your account

1. Open the cTrader account your firm gave you, or a demo on the same broker, and add the cBot to an XAUUSD H1 chart.
2. In the parameter panel, set Preset to Low Drawdown Gold H1. It is in the cBot; there is no file to find or load.
3. Set Stop loss % and the closing time to your firm's limits, and narrow the weekday windows if the firm restricts sessions.
4. Open the Backtesting tab, choose real tick data, your account's starting balance, your account's leverage and your broker's commission, and run the window you care about.
5. Read the equity drawdown and the per-day fall, not the return. They are what ends an account.
6. Only then start it forward, and watch the dashboard's status row: it says in plain words why it is not trading when it is not trading.

A backtester cannot apply the news filter, because no backtester carries an economic calendar, and it always runs on server time. Both of those make a backtest slightly more active than the live configuration, not less.

What comes with it

One payment of 147 USD through the cTrader Store, which covers every update of version 2; the Store's 14-day money-back period covers the purchase. All eight presets are inside the cBot and switch from the first parameter, so there is nothing to download and nothing to import. The full parameter reference, the dashboard reference, the news-filter behaviour and the risk disclosure are on the product page, and the video above walks the seven checks and every setting on a real chart.

Requirements

cTrader Desktop 5.x on Windows or Mac, a hedging account for the grid modes, leverage 1:100 or higher, XAUUSD in your broker's spelling of it, the H1 chart. The cBot declares no access rights at all; the news calendar is read through cTrader's own networking service, which is why it needs none. Keep the platform running, or use a VPS.

Support

Through the Discussion tab of the Store listing, so the conversation stays next to the product. Please include your broker, your firm and programme, the cTrader version, the preset in use and the instance log.