Recentring straddle grid for news and event spikes
A MetaTrader 5 Expert Advisor built for the minutes around CPI, non-farm payrolls and FOMC. It rests a tiered ladder of stop orders on both sides of the price before the print lands, lets the number decide which side fills, and rides the move out on a hard trailing stop that sits at your broker rather than in your terminal. A grid strategy — read the risk section before you buy.
The problem it solves
Trading a release by predicting the direction means being wrong half the time at the worst possible moment. This does not predict: it rests orders on both sides beforehand, lets the print pick the side, and manages the resulting basket out with a stop that lives at the broker rather than in your terminal.
What you see on Chart
From a live MetaTrader 5 terminal — not a mock-up. Click it to open full size.
A schematic of the panel, not a screenshot of one. Block proportions follow the real thing so the two read together; no values are shown, because everything in those slots is either your account data or a setting.
One grid, end to end
The same stages run every time. Where a run ends is decided by what price does after the break — not by anything the engine concluded beforehand.
A diagram of the paths through the logic, not a claim about how often each one occurs. The log shows events only — no prices, sizes or results.
Execution log
RunningIllustration of the event stream the engine writes. Events only — no prices, sizes or results are shown.
Run 1 of 3 — Breaks and runs
Ladder laid
Buy stops above, sell stops below, a fixed distance apart, each tier larger than the one inside it. Nothing about it is directional yet.
Break
Price crosses the first level on one side and that order fills. The market picked the side, not the software.
Filling
Each further level the move crosses adds a larger position. Break-even is recalculated on every fill and moves toward price.
Stop armed
The side is far enough above its own break-even for a real stop-loss to be written onto every leg at the broker.
Ratcheting
The level follows the best price reached and never moves back. Legs that fill afterwards adopt the current level automatically.
Banked
Price touches the stop, or the move travels far enough from the centre to bank the basket. Everything closes together and a fresh grid is laid.
Stop armed, ratcheted, basket closed on it
In detail
CPI, non-farm payrolls, FOMC. You attach it across the releases that produce a real move, and before the number lands a ladder of buy stop orders is already resting above the price with a mirrored ladder of sell stops below it — a fixed distance apart, each level larger than the one inside it. Nothing about the setup is directional. The print picks the side.
The economic calendar is read and shown on the panel with a countdown, an impact rating and the last release’s actual against forecast — but it is information for you, and it never gates a trade. The session-hour filter was removed for the same reason. If you are expecting software that waits for a signal, this is not that, and the difference matters more than anything else on this page.
Exits are placed with your broker as genuine stop orders, so they keep working when your machine does not. The level only ever moves in your favour, and once it has been set the basket cannot close below its own break-even.
Once a move has travelled far enough from where the grid was laid, the basket is banked and a fresh ladder is built at the new price. That is what keeps it working through an extended run rather than sitting on a grid the market has left behind.
Everything the engine knows is on one panel: state, uptime and server clock, the calendar block with its countdown and phase, floating result in the largest type on screen, today’s realised result and deal count, exposure and lot counts, spread and ping dials, and an action log of the last thing it did. It is drawn as a single composited bitmap, so it stays sharp at any zoom and costs almost nothing to redraw.
Emergency Exit cancels the entire pending ladder in a single burst, closes every open position and latches the engine so nothing can redeploy until you clear it. You also choose its reach: this EA on this chart, this EA everywhere, or every position on the symbol including your own manual trades.
Your copy is locked to one MT5 account number and checked inside your own terminal, so it will run on a machine with no connection at all and cannot be switched off remotely. One licence issues two keys, so a demo account can run alongside your live one. If a licence lapses mid-basket the engine keeps managing and trailing what is already open — it stops new exposure, never abandons existing positions.
What it is for
This is not an engine you leave running all month. It is built for the prints that produce a violent, one-directional move, and the way you use it is to have it attached across them. The ladder is already in the market before the number lands; when price leaves the centre, the orders on that side fill the whole way up and a hard trailing stop rides the move out and banks it.
You choose the events. The panel tells you when they are.
The calendar block counts down to the next qualifying release, so you know when to be attached and watching. The engine itself never reads that countdown — the section below is explicit about why.
A clean directional break is the case it is designed around
One print, one direction, the ladder filling into it, and a stop that follows the running peak and closes every leg together at the top. That is the run this engine exists for.
Not every print behaves like that
A number landing close to forecast, leaving price chopping around the centre, is the bad case — and it is the one that fills both sides of the ladder in turn. The risk section further down is specific about it rather than general.
A diagram of the intended use, not a recorded trade. Distance is measured in grid levels rather than price, and no profit, size or result is shown or implied.
The mechanic that matters
You run it across the releases that actually move gold — CPI, non-farm payrolls, FOMC. A symmetric ladder of stop orders is already resting above and below the price when the number lands, spaced a fixed distance apart, with order size growing the further out each level sits. Whichever way the print sends the market, the orders on that side fill one after another and the basket builds into the move. There is no indicator and no entry signal: the engine does not need to know what the number was, only to be standing on both sides of it.
There is no signal to be wrong about
Nothing is predicted, so nothing can be predicted wrongly at the worst possible moment. Both sides are already resting in the market before the number lands, and the print decides which of them fills.
The basket is managed as one position
The whole group is opened, tracked and closed as one thing, never as a set of separate trades that could be left half-unwound. Break-even, exposure and the floating result are recalculated on every fill, and when the basket closes, it closes in a single action.
Each tier is larger than the one inside it
The further a move extends, the bigger the positions being added to it. Exposure is therefore at its largest exactly when price is at its most stretched — which is what makes a clean run profitable and a reversal expensive.
The stop only exists once the side is far enough ahead
Because every larger fill drags break-even up toward price, a fast run can fill much of the ladder without ever getting far enough above its own break-even for a stop to be written. Until it arms, there is nothing resting underneath the basket.
A diagram of the mechanism, not a record of results. The axis counts grid levels rather than dollars, and the ladder is drawn five levels a side for legibility — the real depth, spacing and sizing are settings you control.
The calendar on the panel
The panel reads MetaTrader 5’s own licensed economic calendar and shows the next event, a live countdown, its impact and currency, the last release’s actual against forecast, and which phase of a release you are standing in. That is how you decide when to be attached. It is not how the engine decides anything — its behaviour is identical in every phase of every event.
The filter was removed on purpose
Standing the engine down around a high-impact release would stand it down at the exact moment the strategy exists for. A news filter would be working against it, so there is not one — and the session-hour filter is gone for the same reason. This is a design decision, not a missing feature.
It reads the terminal’s own feed
The data comes from the licensed MetaQuotes calendar already inside MT5. Nothing is scraped from a website, nothing depends on a third-party service staying up, and nothing about your account is transmitted anywhere.
It reads OFFLINE in the Strategy Tester
MetaTrader does not expose the calendar to backtests, so the news block shows OFFLINE during one. That is a platform limitation rather than a fault — and because the calendar never gates a trade, it does not change how the engine behaves in a test.
Phase widths are drawn for legibility, not to scale. The countdown is a clock, not a forecast, and no phase changes what the engine does.
Where the stop actually lives
The trailing stop is written onto your positions as a broker-side stop-loss rather than a level the software watches and acts on. If your terminal, your VPS or your internet connection dies, the stop is still sitting at the broker. On a strategy whose automatic protection is that one stop, where it rests is not a detail.
One shared level per side
Every leg on the trailed side carries the same stop price, so the basket exits as a unit and the pyramid is never sliced apart. A leg that fills afterwards adopts the current level automatically.
It ratchets, and it is never loosened
The level moves in your favour and never, under any circumstance, moves back. A leg already carrying a tighter stop keeps it.
Once armed, the basket can only exit green
The default engine will not place the level below break-even. It arms once the side is far enough ahead and from then on keeps a floor above it, so an armed basket does not close at a loss.
A resting order is not a guarantee of price. It does not protect against a gap straight through the level or a liquidity hole during a release — see the risk section below.
The button that matters
Cancelling a ladder one order at a time means one round trip to the broker per order. On a slow link that is several seconds of your own pending orders unwinding in front of you — and in a news spike, several seconds is the whole move. Emergency Exit skips the panel’s ordinary retry queue and calls the engine’s bulk path instead: every pending cancelled in a single asynchronous burst, every open position closed, and the engine latched so nothing can redeploy.
It latches until you release it
Afterwards the button reads EMERG RELEASE and no new grid can deploy whatever price does. Clearing the latch is one deliberate click — it is the exit that asks for confirmation, not the recovery.
Two clicks, and the log says what the second will do
The destructive buttons arm on the first click and execute on the second, and disarm themselves if you hesitate or click elsewhere. During a spike that is a feature rather than friction — though you can switch it off for one-click closes if you prefer.
You decide what it is allowed to touch
The close buttons can be scoped to this EA on this symbol, this EA on every symbol, or every position on the symbol including your own manual trades. The panel prints the active scope directly above the buttons, so there is never any doubt about what is in range.
Illustrative of the difference in approach. No timings are claimed — round-trip latency depends on your broker and your connection, not on the software.
Before you buy
Four things worth knowing before you buy. They are in the manual too — this is the short version.
Order size increases with distance from the centre, so a long run leaves you holding considerably more than the first fill did. It is designed to operate in the most volatile minutes of the trading day, and it is capable of large or total account loss.
It caps how much of a completed run you hand back. It does not cap an adverse reversal after the ladder has already pyramided, it cannot protect against a gap straight through the level, and it cannot help during a broker outage or a liquidity hole in a release.
The equity stop and the daily loss halt are both off by default, because a hard equity halt can close a basket mid-spike — exactly when this engine is meant to be holding. That is a deliberate trade-off, and until you turn them on the trailing stop is your only automatic protection.
The engine needs the move to go somewhere and keep going. A post-news range that fills both sides in turn, or a weekend gap that jumps several levels at once, is where a straddle grid does its worst damage — and neither of those is rare.
In one line
A handful of clean prints pay for the ones that chop. That is the shape of the strategy, not a fault in it — so size the account for the release that goes both ways, and judge it over months rather than over one number.
Trading leveraged products carries a high level of risk and can result in the loss of more than your initial deposit. X-STOX makes no representation that this Expert Advisor will be profitable. Nothing on this page is financial advice. The full risk disclosure ships with the product.
Testing
Recordings and reports from the MetaTrader Strategy Tester.
A tester run is not a track record. The news block reads OFFLINE for every one of these runs, because the Strategy Tester is not given access to the calendar. That changes nothing about how the engine trades — the calendar never gates a trade — but it does mean a tester run cannot show you that block doing its job. Tick data also under-represents spread and slippage at exactly the moments that matter here. Read these as a look at how the engine behaves, not as a forecast.
Licensing
Each licence binds to a fixed number of trading account numbers. Contact support to rebind if you change broker.
lifetime
lifetime
Software licences are digital goods — read the refund policy before purchasing.
Specification
Strategy
Platform & account
Licence
Broker requirements
MetaTrader 5 on a hedging account — a netting account merges the legs and the break-even arithmetic stops meaning anything. Built for gold and attaches to any symbol, with suffixed names, 2- and 3-digit gold, 4- and 5-digit FX and ECN or raw accounts all handled automatically. Your broker’s spread through the minutes around a release matters more here than on anything else in the range: the engine skips laying a grid while the spread is unusually wide, so a broker whose baseline is already wide will sit out precisely the minutes this was built for.
Check your broker before you buy, not after
Typical spread on your broker’s gold symbol. These bands describe the broker, not a setting in the software. Most brokers list gold more than once and the variants are nothing alike — check the symbol, not the brand.
You get the engine, the on-chart command panel, the full manual with the risk section written out, a second key for your demo account, and updates for as long as the product exists.
Enquiry
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