The Backtest Claimed +60% in 11 Months. Ours Found Zero Winning Configurations.

Larry Williams' volatility breakout is a classic: when price moves a meaningful fraction of yesterday's range away from today's open, that's real order flow, not noise — so go with it. An MQL5 article implemented it for gold and reported the kind of backtest that sells EAs: +60% in 11 months, "steady progression," no extreme drawdowns.

The fine print, easy to miss: the test covered January–November 2025 only — one hand-picked year, on daily bars, in one of gold's great bull runs — and charged zero commission.

Our version of the test

Same rules, implemented faithfully: buy when price closes above day open + K × yesterday's range (mirror short below), stop at a fraction of yesterday's range, take-profit at a reward multiple, one trade per day, flat before the next day's levels.

Instead of one lucky year, we ran the complete parameter grid — every combination of breakout multiple (0.3–0.8), stop multiple (0.3–0.7), and reward ratio (2–5), 72 in all — over 2019–2022 on real tick data with commission included. Not a genetic sample that might miss pockets: every single cell of the space.

All 72 lost money. The best combination finished at −$6,180 on $10,000; the worst near −$9,500. There was no corner of the parameter space to rescue, no "with better tuning..." left on the table.

We found a bug in our own test, too

Full disclosure: our first run of this grid had a data-convention bug. On UTC tick data the market's Sunday-evening open creates tiny "Sunday" daily bars (a $3–6 range versus $11–60 for real trading days), and our EA's "yesterday's range" picked those stubs up every Monday — corrupting levels and stops on roughly 20% of trades. A code review caught it, we fixed it (Mondays now use Friday's full range; Sunday stubs never trade), and re-ran the entire grid on clean code. The fix genuinely helped — the best configuration's profit factor rose from 0.28 to 0.42 — but helped is not profitable. Every number in this post is from the clean re-run. Testing rigor has to cut both ways: if we hold vendor backtests to a standard, our own bugs get disclosed and re-run, not quietly patched.

Why the same rules produce opposite backtests

Three differences between their test and ours explain everything:

1. Costs. With ~150 trades over three years paying spread and commission on every round turn, the cost drag alone consumes several percent per year before the strategy earns anything.
2. The stop sits inside gold's noise. Stops at 0.3–0.7× yesterday's range were routinely hit within minutes; win rates ran near 20% while the ambitious reward targets (2–5× the stop) rarely filled before the 23-hour time exit.
3. One year versus three. Gold's 2025 melt-up rewarded any long-biased breakout. Sweep 2019–2022 — chop, crash, rally, range — and the melt-up year's flattery disappears.

None of this makes the source article dishonest; it makes it a single-period, cost-free demonstration, which is what most published backtests are. The retest is what tells you whether there's a strategy underneath the demonstration. Here, there wasn't.

A note on the breakout family

This is our second data point on breakouts. The Asian-session range breakout — a session-anchored cousin of this idea — showed a genuine multi-year edge on USD/JPY while failing on EUR/USD. This daily-open volatility expansion fails on gold outright. The family label tells you almost nothing; the specific mechanism on the specific instrument is the entire question.

Like our RSI(2) gold test, this strategy was rejected at the in-sample stage: nothing survived optimization, so our locked out-of-sample window (2022–2026) was never touched. Total cost of the answer: one afternoon of compute.

All tested strategies — winners and losers — live on the results page.

Past performance is not indicative of future results. These are backtests with realistic cost assumptions, not live trading records.