Gold Ratchet EA Free Download – MT5 XAUUSD Breakout Scalper Review

Gold Ratchet EA is an automated MetaTrader 5 (MT5) robot that trades XAUUSD (gold) with five breakout strategies from one chart. For this 2026 review we ran a 100% real-tick backtest over the same 14 weeks as a live account running it, then read all 833 orders and 283 trades to see what drives it. Free download at the bottom.

Traders may know it as MoonDog EA. The five strategies still sign their orders Moon Nova, Moon Apex, Moon Zenith, Moon Pulse and Moon Eclipse, so those are the names you will see in the terminal’s comment column.

TL;DR -Free MT5 gold robot with breakout entries that trades like a one-minute scalper. A $2 stop on every order and no grid or martingale, but up to five positions can open on one move. The live account and our test agree month by month. Results depend on fast fills.

What is the Gold Ratchet EA?

Gold Ratchet EA is a MetaTrader 5 expert advisor for XAUUSD that places stop orders a median $51 from price, at levels tied to recent highs and lows. Every order carries a $2.00 stop loss and a $15 target. Once a trade is $1 in profit, the stop locks half of the best gain, so most trades close inside a minute.

Core Strategy and Logic

• Five strategies on one chart – Nova, Apex, Zenith, Pulse and Eclipse each place their own orders, and they share the work very unevenly (§3).
• Orders wait far from price – When placed, an order sat a median $51.50 from the market, and 193 of 833 were more than $100 away. The same price is re-placed for days, and one sell stop level went in 21 times. Only 283 orders, about one in three, ever filled.
• Levels come from recent swings – Many orders sit exactly $2.00 or $3.30 inside a recent M15 swing high or low, so a run toward the old high fills the buy before the high itself breaks. About 2 in 5 of Eclipse’s orders match that pattern, against about 1 in 7 by chance. We could not rebuild every level from the bars, so treat the full rule as unknown.
• It works on the bar clock – 627 of the 833 orders went in on the open of an M15 bar, and another 180 two minutes after the market reopened (01:02 server time on weekdays, 05:02 on Mondays). Unfilled orders expire on fixed timers of 15 to 60 hours.
• Same stop and target on every order – The stop is $2.00 (20 gold pips) on all 833 orders, the target $15 ($14 on Apex) and the size 0.01 lots. No grid, no martingale, no averaging into a loser.
• The ratchet does the exiting – At $1 of profit per 0.01 lot the EA moves the stop to keep 50% of the best profit so far, and keeps moving it. It modified stops 1,511 times across 283 trades, sometimes several times in one second.
• Weekend Shield – Pending orders are deleted four hours before the Friday close and new ones only go in four hours after the Monday open (19:57 and 05:02 on our test server). That removed 137 orders across 14 Fridays.

Here is the ratchet on one trade. On 9 July at 09:00:14 a buy stop filled at 4,088.59. Three seconds later the stop was already above entry, and it moved 24 more times in the next 26 seconds as gold rose. The trade closed at 4,093.96 after 1 minute 45 seconds, for $5.37 on 0.01 lots.

Eleven targets in 14 weeks means the $15 take profit is a ceiling, not the plan. This is a one-minute scalper with breakout entries. The median trade lasted 21 seconds, 194 of 283 closed inside a minute, and the longest ran 32 minutes.

The layout is close to the five-strategy Gold Pivot Breakout EA, which also trades swing levels with stop orders but uses a $12 to $15 stop and holds for about 40 minutes. In speed it sits with the 15-second Gold Tripwire EA. Both trade a fast form of the volatility breakout approach many traders run by hand.

Please test in a demo account first for at least a week. Also, please familiarize yourself and understand how this Zerqon EA works, then only use it in a real account.

Gold Ratchet EA Settings

These are the inputs worth knowing. Our test ran every one at its default.

There is no stop loss input.

Recommendations for the XAUUSD Breakout Scalper EA

• Deposit and leverage – Gold traded between $3,960 and $4,610 in our window, so one 0.01-lot position needed $40-46 of margin at 1:100 and $8-9 at 1:500, and up to five can be open together. Plan on about $300 at 1:100, or $100 at 1:500.
• Pair and timeframe – XAUUSD only. The chart timeframe does not change the strategies.
• Broker – A raw-spread ECN account with fast execution, because the edge per trade is small (Performance §4).
• VPS – The profit lock and the XAUUSD Breakout Scalper EA’s own closes only work while MT5 is running (FXVM).
• Guards – Keep the news pause on and switch the daily loss limit on at a level you can live with. It ships off.
• Check your own numbers with the margin calculator and the lot size optimizer (Find the Perfect Broker For You Here).

Performance Review: Live Account and Our Own Backtest

1. The live account, read in dollars

Both headline percentages come from a $60 base. The 20% maximum drawdown (the largest drop from a balance peak) was $32, taken in late July when the balance was near $160. The dollar results sit in the table below.

2. Our matched backtest

Three of the four months line up: two strong summer months, then a flat September in both records. The flat month is the strategy, not one account’s bad luck. The best trades land 23 cents apart ($15.35 live, $15.12 in the test), which is the $15 target plus a few cents on the fill.

The live account loses $0.38 more per losing trade on average, and its worst trade is $2.31 deeper. On a $2 stop that gap is slippage (the difference between the order price and the actual fill). It explains part of the lower live profit factor (gross profit divided by gross loss), which is 2.22 against 3.27.

October is the one miss. Our test made $83 of its $105.83 on two days, 2 October, an NFP Friday, and 7 October. We can’t see the live account’s settings, so we won’t guess at the cause. A working live news pause would normally have blocked the NFP trades (§5).

3. Five strategies, often one trade

121 of the 283 trades opened in 33 groups of 2 to 6 within a minute of each other, every group in one direction, with up to five positions open at once. Those groups made 83% of the profit before costs.

The best group made $53.67 on 19 August, when three of five positions reached the target. The worst lost $11.65 on the evening of 8 September when all five stopped out together, more than a tenth of a $100 account in minutes. In percentage mode at the default 2% per order, five orders on one move put 10% of the balance at risk at once.

Eclipse is the engine. The other four trade rarely, and their high profit factors rest on 20 to 30 trades each, too few to rank them.

4. The fills decide the result

Winners are small. The median winning trade made $1.48, and 77 winning trades made less than $1. At that size, getting in and out is the cost that matters. Every fill in our test came at or worse than the order price. Slippage cost $121 on entries and $55 on exits, about a third of the $544 the winning trades made before costs. That is with the tester’s simulated 223-millisecond delay.

The best hours were 15:00 to 17:00 server time, which is 08:00 to 10:00 in New York (convert to your clock). Those two hours made $181 of the $390 before costs. That is when US data lands and gold moves fastest, which is exactly what a stop order with a quick lock needs.

5. News trades, and what no backtest can show

The EA pauses new entries around NFP, CPI and FOMC by reading the MT5 economic calendar. The MT5 Strategy Tester has no economic calendar, so in any backtest that pause does nothing. Our test traded straight through. Against the official CPI release schedule and FOMC calendar, 28 trades fell inside the pause windows.

Together they made $18.33, so the test result does not lean on news. They do show what the pause is for. On 4 September a sell stop filled $16.30 below its order price in the NFP spike, eight times the size of the stop. The gap carried it past its own target, so it closed $0.56 down.

6. Deposit and leverage, measured

The live account opened with $60 and works because it runs at 1:500. We ran the same settings on $60 at 1:100. The EA could only fund one order at a time and took 8 trades in 14 weeks, ending at $67.09. At $100 and 1:100 it took all 283 trades, but 10 orders were rejected for margin and the margin level fell to 100.1%, a margin-call level at many brokers. Leverage, not the deposit alone, decides how much of the strategy you actually get.

Can you use the Gold Ratchet EA on a prop firm account?

The guards are there: a prop mode with daily loss, total drawdown, a safety buffer and a profit target, plus an option for blank order comments. At fixed 0.01 lots on a $10,000 challenge, our worst day (-$11.48) barely registers.

Check two things first. Some firms restrict very short trades or news trading, and this EA does plenty of both. In percentage mode, set the risk per order to a fifth of what you would accept on a single trade, because of the grouped entries in §3. Our prop firm trading strategies guide covers the usual rules.

Gold Ratchet EA

An MT5 XAUUSD robot running five stop-order strategies from one chart, with a $2 stop on every order and a lock that keeps half of each trade's best profit. Its 14-week live account and our matched real-tick backtest went up in the same months and went flat in the same month.

Live record vs our test

★★★☆☆

Risk control

★★★☆☆

Execution dependence

★★☆☆☆

Pros

• Every one of 833 orders in our test carried a $2.00 stop at 0.01 lots, with no averaging or recovery
• The live account and our test match month by month, including the flat September
• Runs from $100 at 1:500 leverage on the default fixed lot
• Weekend pause, news pause, daily loss limit and prop firm guards are built in

Cons

• Up to five same-direction positions on one move, and 121 of 283 trades opened in groups
• The median winner is $1.48, and live losses averaged $0.38 more than in our test
• Only 14 weeks of live history, with a flat September in both records

Summary

2.7

★★★☆☆☆

The mechanics are simple once the log is read: stop orders at recent swing levels, a fixed $2 stop, and a lock that banks half the move within seconds. The live account and our test tell the same story over the same weeks. The catch is size. The average winner is small enough that spread and slippage decide whether the edge survives, and the five strategies often trade the same move.

MT5 Is this working?

FREE DOWNLOAD

Last tested by @Silent in Oct 2026 for ForexCracked Editorial.

How it compares to other fast gold robots we have tested

It has the shortest live record of the four, so its profit factor carries the least weight.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Conclusion

Gold Ratchet EA is a disciplined fast scalper: a fixed stop on every order, no recovery tricks, and a live record our own test reproduces over the same weeks. However, it earns in small pieces, so what you keep depends more on your broker’s fills than on any setting. If you have a raw-spread account and a VPS, run it on a demo with your own broker for a month and compare the average loss with the -$2.16 in our test. If yours is much worse, the edge is gone.