ABS FX Grid

Trading Logic

ABS FX Grid is a grid trading bot for the CAD crosses. From one chart it trades:

• AUDCAD, GBPCAD and NZDCAD — each can be switched on or off
• Buy and Sell — every pair runs its own Buy basket and its own Sell basket, independent of the others
• A grid of positions per basket rather than a single trade, closed together at a basket Take Profit
• A lot size that scales with your balance, with optional minimum and maximum lot limits

How a Basket Works

• All management — Take Profit, grid adds, pruning — runs automatically. There is no broker-side TP: the EA closes the basket itself.
• A new basket only opens on a side that has no open basket for that pair. Up to six baskets can exist (3 pairs × Buy and Sell), limited by the same-CAD-direction cap.
• New trades are filtered (spread, volatility, news, rate expectation). Closing is never filtered: basket TP, pruning and the drawdown stop always run.

Minimum Requirements

The $2,000+ recommendation follows the default lot sizing of 0.01 lot per $2,000 of balance (see 04). Below that, the entry lot stays at the 0.01 minimum, so the risk is larger relative to the account. With three pairs and two sides, several baskets can be open at the same time — keep enough free margin for that.

Installation & Initial Setup

1. Make sure AUDCAD, GBPCAD and NZDCAD are available at your broker (show them in Market Watch).
2. Open one chart — for example AUDCAD — and drag ABS FX Grid from the Navigator onto it. The EA trades all enabled pairs from this single chart.
3. In the Inputs tab, configure parameters according to this guide (the defaults are a sensible start).
4. Enable Algo Trading — the button in the MetaTrader toolbar must be active — and allow algo trading in the EA's Common tab.
5. Check the Experts tab: on start the EA prints any symbol mapping (e.g. Symbol AUDCAD -> AUDCAD.raw) and, if a news or rate filter is on, the calendar download.

General & Lot Settings

1. General Setting

The same-CAD-direction cap

A Buy on AUDCAD, GBPCAD or NZDCAD sells CAD; a Sell buys CAD. Three Buy baskets are effectively one CAD short three times over — and a strong CAD move hits all of them at once. The cap limits how many baskets may point the same way:

• 1 — at most one CAD-short and one CAD-long basket at a time (the most conservative)
• 2 — the default
• 3 — no limit with three pairs

Baskets on opposite sides do not count against each other (a Buy AUDCAD with a Sell GBPCAD largely cancels the CAD part). When the cap is full, the panel shows CAD LIMIT 2/2 on the blocked side.

2. Lots size Progression

Grid adds follow a built-in lot progression, so lots can grow as a basket gets deeper. All lots are rounded to your broker's lot step.

Grid, Take Profit & Drawdown

A basket on the chart

The entry signal, grid spacing, lot progression, Take Profit and pruning rules are built into the EA and are not inputs. Your controls are the lot size, the lot limits, the filters and the drawdown stop.

3. Max Drawdown (emergency close-all)

The real risk: a strong one-way move

A grid profits from pullbacks. Its weak point is a strong trend that runs without a meaningful pullback: the basket keeps adding, the lots step up, and the floating loss grows faster than pruning and the basket TP can work it off. On the CAD crosses that typically happens around a surprise from the Bank of Canada, the RBA, the BoE or the RBNZ — which is exactly what the news filter and the rate expectation filter are built for.

News Filter

Pauses new trades — first entries and grid adds — around high-impact releases for either currency of a pair. Basket TP, pruning and the drawdown stop keep running during a pause.

• Per pair: a pair pauses when either of its currencies has an event. A CAD event pauses all three pairs; an AUD event pauses only AUDCAD.
• Any terminal language: events are picked by the calendar's event code (for example boc-interest-rate-decision, cpi-yy), not by their translated names.
• Live: the EA reads the MQL5 economic calendar itself and refreshes it every 6 hours.
• The Experts tab prints one line per pause, e.g. News pause AUDCAD: CAD CPI … - no new trades, and the panel shows NEWS CAD CPI.
• With the Info Panel on, each release of the enabled news types is marked on the chart's time axis for the chart pair's two currencies (orange-red = rate decision, gold = CPI, blue = jobs). Hover a marker for the time, event code and pause window.

Rate Expectation Filter

A fundamental filter that only lets new baskets open in the direction the next central-bank decisions are expected to point. It reads each currency's published economic data from the MQL5 economic calendar, forms a rate outlook for both currencies of a pair, and blocks new baskets that would trade against it.

• It works per pair — AUDCAD, GBPCAD and NZDCAD can each lean a different way.
• It only affects new first entries. Grid adds inside an open basket are never blocked by it, so a basket can always keep working toward its Take Profit.
• When the outlook gives no edge either way, the pair is neutral and may trade both sides (or pause — see the second input).

When a signal is skipped, the panel shows AGAINST RATE BIAS or EQUAL RATES pause, and the Rate expectation column shows the current outlook of each pair.

How to Trade a Grid Bot

A grid bot builds its position over time instead of risking everything on one trade. That changes how you should size and manage the account:

1. Allocate a portion of your capital, not all of it. Run ABS FX Grid on an amount you are comfortable seeing in drawdown.
2. Withdraw profits at a defined interval. Set a target — for example +20% — and withdraw when it is reached, instead of leaving all profit exposed to the next drawdown cycle. You can test this cycle with the Backtest Simulation settings.
3. Keep the Max Drawdown stop active. It is the hard limit that closes everything if conditions turn against the grid.
4. Watch your CAD exposure. The same-CAD-direction cap and the news filter around Bank of Canada decisions matter most, because CAD sits in every pair.
5. Review before re-depositing. If the drawdown stop ever fires, review what happened before restarting at the same size.

Backtesting

7. Backtest Simulation

Simulates the profit-withdrawal cycle from 08. These settings only work in the Strategy Tester and have no effect on live trading.

Testing with the news or rate filter on

The economic calendar is not available inside the Strategy Tester, so the EA uses a saved copy:

1. Attach ABS FX Grid once to a live or demo chart with a news or rate filter switched on. It downloads the calendar and saves ABSFX_News.csv to MQL5\Files and to the shared Common\Files folder.
2. Run the backtest. The Journal shows News filter: … events loaded from ….

• If the file is missing, the EA stops with a clear message instead of testing without its filters.
• Backtests on your own computer's agents read the file from Common\Files. The MQL5 Cloud Network cannot access it — run optimizations with the news or rate filter on locally.
• With all news and rate filters off, no file is needed at all.

Info Panel

A live panel on the chart shows the account state and every basket of every pair. It is a single object: click it and drag it anywhere — the position is remembered for that chart.

Account line

Balance, equity and the bot's floating P/L · drawdown vs the Max Drawdown limit (amber from 40% of the limit, red from 75%) · the current entry lot with the min/max lot limits · CAD baskets short / long vs the cap · an NFP-day note when that pause is active.

Pair rows — one BUY and one SELL row per pair

With the rate filter on, one extra line per currency shows its current outlook and policy rate.

Status values

Quick Start Checklist

1. Open a hedging demo account at an ECN or RAW broker
2. Set leverage to at least 1:100
3. Fund the demo with $2,000 or more
4. Show AUDCAD, GBPCAD and NZDCAD in Market Watch
5. Attach ABS FX Grid to one chart (e.g. AUDCAD)
6. Keep the defaults, or adjust per this guide — at least review Max lot and the Max Drawdown stop
7. Optional: switch on the news filter (rate decisions first) and the rate expectation filter
8. Enable Algo Trading and check the Experts tab for start-up messages
9. Monitor the demo for at least 2–4 weeks
10. Move to live only once you are comfortable with how the EA behaves on your broker

Frequently Asked Questions

Risk Disclaimer