A Free Gold EA for MetaTrader 5: the Gold Vigil Beta Is Open to Everyone
Published Oct 21, 2026, 12:01 AM · 4 min read
Gold Vigil is a free XAUUSD Expert Advisor for MetaTrader 5, and the beta is open to anyone. No purchase, no subscription, no card, and you do not need to own anything else of ours first. You get the build, a 90-day licence key and every update during the beta. The only thing asked in return is one honest test report.
This article is the long version: what Gold Vigil does, what the back tests actually show including the years it made nothing, and how to join. If you only want the build, go straight to the Gold Vigil beta page.
What Gold Vigil does
Gold Vigil trades gold against the US dollar. It watches the most recent standing swing high and swing low on the hourly chart, and places a stop order just inside each level rather than outside it. The name is the mechanic: it keeps a vigil at the level and waits, sometimes for hours, for price to come to it.
In order:
- Every 15 minutes it scans H1 bars for the newest swing high and swing low, defined as a bar whose high or low beats the five bars either side of it and which nothing newer has taken out.
- It places a buy stop 0.08% below the swing high, or a sell stop 0.08% above the swing low, and moves that order onto a newer level as one forms.
- Stop loss 2% of price, take profit 0.7% of price. Every distance is a percentage, so nothing needs re-tuning as gold reprices from 1,800 to 4,300 USD.
- Once filled, it checks the trade every minute: break-even at +0.1%, a trailing stop from +0.2% that stops trailing at +1% so a large move is left to run, and a salvage exit that walks the target back once a trade is 1% underwater, to leave on a bounce rather than at the full stop.
There is a stop loss on every trade. No grid, no martingale, no averaging into losers.
The back tests, including the bad years
MT5 strategy tester, every tick based on real ticks, XAUUSD on a RoboForex-Pro feed, 100,000 USD starting balance, default settings, measured 21 October 2026.
| Period | Return | Profit factor | Max equity drawdown | Trades |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2022 | −0.7% | 1.00 | 18.7% | 1,388 |
| 2023 | +43.1% | 1.36 | 18.0% | 1,454 |
| 2024 | +0.1% | 1.00 | 17.6% | 1,329 |
| 2025 | +25.3% | 1.18 | 14.2% | 1,184 |
| 2026 (9 months) | +51.7% | 1.64 | 7.7% | 795 |
| All 4.8 years | +170% | 1.21 | 33.0% | 6,266 |
Read all of those rows, not just the good ones. The last twelve months are the best stretch this engine has ever had. But 2022 and 2024 were flat for the entire year, the worst drawdown was a third of the account, and the most recent three months have been break-even. It earns in bursts and then does nothing for months.
Why a 90% win rate is not what it sounds like
Gold Vigil wins about 87% of its trades. That number gets used to sell a lot of robots, so here is the arithmetic nobody shows you. It risks 2% to make 0.7%. A system with that reward-to-risk ratio needs roughly a 74% win rate just to break even.
So 87% is a margin of about thirteen points, not eighty-seven. One full stop loss erases roughly three winners. Any EA advertising a 90% win rate without telling you its reward-to-risk ratio is telling you nothing at all.
Why it is free
Because a back test is not evidence. Everything above was measured on one broker, one feed, one symbol name and one set of spreads. What we cannot produce in-house is what happens on your broker — whether the stop orders get rejected for being too close to price, whether the EA recognises a symbol called XAUUSD.m or GOLD.spot, and whether the trade count looks anything like ours.
That is the trade. You get a working gold EA for nothing. We get the one thing money cannot buy quickly, which is a hundred brokers we do not have accounts with.
What you have to do in return
File at least one report: which broker you used, how many days you ran it, how many trades it took, and anything that went wrong. The form is structured rather than a blank box, because a comparable report is worth several prose ones.
Beyond that, reporting is a game. The Vigil Trials is a quest board with fourteen quests and six ranks. Cover a broker nobody has tested, find a reproducible bug, run it for thirty days, and you earn rank. Rank earns things that are not for sale: builds before anyone else, your settings shipped inside the EA as a named preset, your name credited in it, and at Lampbearer a free lifetime licence for the commercial release if there ever is one. The first 25 testers keep a Founding Tester mark permanently.
What you need
- MetaTrader 5 and an XAUUSD chart. Any timeframe — the EA uses its own H1, M15 and M1 internally.
- A demo account is strongly recommended. The build does not block a real-money account, it warns; setting InpDemoOnly to true makes it refuse to start on a live one. On a live account any loss is yours.
- WebRequest permission for the licence check: Tools, Options, Expert Advisors, then add our domain to the allowed URL list.
- Two weeks of patience. At roughly 100 to 130 trades a month, a few days tells neither of us anything.
Join
Seats are capped at 60 testers and approval is automatic while they last. Open the Gold Vigil beta page, press Join, and your licence key appears in your portal straight away. The manual covers installation, every setting, how to make it calmer, and a troubleshooting table.
One last thing, said plainly: trading leveraged products carries a high risk of loss and you can lose more than you deposit. Past performance, including every figure in this article, does not predict future results. Gold Vigil is unreleased software with known flat periods. Test it on demo, and decide for yourself.