KTZ Fx Journal

Notes from running bots on live money.

Setup guides, risk maths and honest post-mortems for traders who automate Forex, Gold and Crypto. No signals, no hype — just what we've learned keeping EAs alive on real accounts.

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Set up an MT5 expert advisor on a VPS in 20 minutes

The exact order we do it in: broker account, VPS, terminal, EA file, settings, first trade. Skip a step and your bot goes offline the night it matters most.

Setup guide · 6 min read · 24 July 2026

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6 articles

Gold

Why XAUUSD needs different risk settings than EURUSD

Gold moves in dollars, not pips, and its overnight gaps punish lot sizes that feel safe on the majors. Here's how we size it.

5 min read 18 July 2026 Risk

Lot size and drawdown: the maths beginners skip

Two numbers decide whether an account survives a bad week. Work them out before you switch a bot on, not after.

6 min read 11 July 2026 Brokers

Choosing a broker for automated trading

Spreads get all the attention. Execution, swap, server stability and withdrawal speed decide far more of your result.

5 min read 3 July 2026 Strategy

Backtest vs live: reading results without fooling yourself

A 99% modelling quality report is not a promise. Four checks that separate a real edge from a curve-fitted fantasy.

7 min read 26 June 2026 Prop firms

Running an EA in a prop firm challenge

Most failed challenges aren't bad trading — they're rule breaches. Read these five clauses before you load a bot.

6 min read 19 June 2026 Setup

Set up an MT5 expert advisor on a VPS in 20 minutes

Broker account, VPS, terminal, EA file, settings, first trade — in the order that avoids the usual mistakes.

6 min read 24 July 2026
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Setup guide

Set up an MT5 expert advisor on a VPS in 20 minutes

24 July 2026 · 6 min read · King Trading Zone

An expert advisor that runs on your laptop stops trading the moment the lid closes, the Wi-Fi drops or Windows decides to restart for an update. Gold does not wait for you. A VPS keeps the terminal online 24 hours a day, and the whole setup takes about twenty minutes if you do it in the right order.

1. Open the trading account first

Everything downstream depends on this, so start here. Open a live account with a broker that allows EAs and hedging, then note down three things: the login number, the password, and the exact server name. That server name is where most people get stuck later — "Vantage-Live 4" and "Vantage-Live 5" are different servers and the terminal will not guess for you.

Fund the account before you continue. A demo can prove the bot loads; only a live account tells you what your real spread and execution look like.

2. Rent a VPS close to the broker's server

Latency matters more than raw specs. A cheap 2 GB VPS in the same region as your broker will beat a powerful one on the other side of the world. For most brokers that means London or New York. Two cores and 2–4 GB of RAM comfortably run one terminal with a couple of charts.

Rule of thumb

One terminal per VPS if the bot is grid or hedge based. Those strategies hold many open positions and a stalled terminal at the wrong moment is expensive.

3. Install the terminal and log in

Connect to the VPS by Remote Desktop, download MT5 from your broker's own website — not a third-party mirror — and log in with the credentials from step one. Check the bottom-right corner of the terminal: you want a green connection bar with a ping figure, not "No connection".

4. Drop the EA in the right folder

In the terminal open File → Open Data Folder, then go to MQL5 → Experts and paste the .ex5 file there. Restart the terminal. The bot now appears in the Navigator panel under Expert Advisors. If it doesn't, you almost certainly put it in the MQL4 folder or in a subfolder that got nested one level too deep.

5. Enable algo trading, then attach

Go to Tools → Options → Expert Advisors and tick "Allow algorithmic trading". Then press the Algo Trading button in the toolbar so it turns green. Drag the EA onto the chart of the pair it was built for — a gold bot belongs on XAUUSD and nowhere else — and set the inputs you were given.

A smiling face in the top-right corner of the chart means the EA is live. A face with an X means algo trading is still off somewhere.

6. Watch the first trade, then leave it alone

Stay on the VPS until the bot opens and manages one position. Confirm the lot size matches what you configured and the stop loss is where you expect. After that, resist the urge to interfere. Manual intervention halfway through an automated sequence is the single most common way a working system is turned into a losing one.

Weekly checklist

Twenty minutes of care at the start saves the week where the bot was offline and nobody noticed until Friday.

Want us to set this up on your account?

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Gold

Why XAUUSD needs different risk settings than EURUSD

18 July 2026 · 5 min read · King Trading Zone

Traders move a bot from EURUSD to gold, keep the same lot size, and are surprised when the drawdown triples in a fortnight. Nothing broke. Gold is simply a different instrument wearing the same interface.

The pip is not the same pip

On EURUSD a standard lot moves roughly $10 per pip. On XAUUSD a standard lot moves about $100 for every dollar gold travels — and gold routinely travels twenty or thirty dollars in a session. The number in the lot box looks familiar; the exposure behind it is an order of magnitude larger.

If you carry a EURUSD lot size straight onto gold, you have not kept your risk the same. You have multiplied it.

Daily range, not average spread

Size gold from its recent daily range rather than from a fixed pip stop. Take the average true range of the last twenty days, decide what fraction of your balance you are willing to lose if price runs the full range against you, and let the lot size fall out of that. When the range widens — and around central bank decisions it always does — the lot size should shrink on its own.

The gap risk nobody budgets for

Gold gaps at the Sunday open, and it gaps hard when geopolitics moves over a weekend. A stop loss does not protect you across a gap; it fills at the first available price. Any strategy that holds positions through the weekend needs either a smaller position or a genuine plan for a gap that jumps straight past the stop.

What we do

Reduce exposure into Friday's close and avoid opening fresh grid sequences in the last two hours of the week. A missed trade costs nothing. A weekend gap into an open grid can cost the account.

Spread behaviour around news

Gold's spread is well behaved most of the day and then widens sharply around US data. A bot placing stops a few dollars from entry will get taken out by the spread alone at 18:00 IST on a CPI day. Either widen stops for that window or add a news filter that stands the bot down for a few minutes either side.

Swap adds up faster than you expect

Overnight financing on gold is meaningful, particularly on the short side with some brokers. A strategy that holds for days can watch a genuine edge get eaten by swap. Check the exact figures in the symbol specification of your own broker before assuming the backtest's numbers apply.

Practical starting point

Gold rewards automation because it trends cleanly and moves every day. It punishes automation that was tuned for a currency pair and never re-checked.

Get our gold settings for your account size.

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Risk

Lot size and drawdown: the maths beginners skip

11 July 2026 · 6 min read · King Trading Zone

Most blown accounts are not the result of a bad strategy. They are the result of a good strategy running at a size the account could never survive. Two calculations, done before you start, prevent nearly all of it.

Calculation one: what a losing streak costs

A system that wins 60% of the time will still lose six in a row on a regular basis — that is ordinary variance, not misfortune. So take your risk per trade and multiply it by the longest losing streak you are prepared to sit through.

At 2% per trade, six losses take you down roughly 11%. At 5% per trade, the same six losses take you down 26% and the psychological damage is worse than the number. Decide which of those you can watch happen without switching the bot off at the exact wrong moment.

Calculation two: what recovery demands

Losses and gains are not symmetric, and the asymmetry gets brutal quickly.

Protecting the account below a 20% drawdown is not caution. It is the difference between a bad month and a dead account.

Sizing that adapts

Fixed lots ignore what has happened to the balance. Percentage risk shrinks the position as the account falls, which is exactly the behaviour you want during a losing run, and grows it again as the account recovers. Every bot we run sizes from the current balance, never from a number typed in once and forgotten.

Worked example

$2,000 account, 1% risk = $20 at risk per trade. If the stop is $8 of gold movement, the position is 0.02 lots ($100 per dollar × 0.02 = $2 per dollar; $20 ÷ $2 = 10 dollars of room). Round down, never up.

Grid and hedge systems need a different question

With a grid, risk per trade is the wrong measure — the meaningful figure is total exposure if price runs to the last layer. Add every layer's lot size, multiply by the full distance to the final level, and check that number against your balance. If a complete adverse run would take more than a quarter of the account, the grid is too aggressive regardless of how good the equity curve looked last month.

Set the stop before the target

The exit that keeps you in business is the losing one. Decide the maximum you will lose on a trade, on a day and on a month, and put those limits into the bot rather than into your intentions. A daily loss cap that halts trading is the single most useful feature we have added to our own systems.

The maths is not complicated. It is just unglamorous, and it is the reason some accounts are still trading two years later.

Not sure what size to run? Send us your balance.

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Brokers

Choosing a broker for automated trading

3 July 2026 · 5 min read · King Trading Zone

Advertised spread is the first thing every broker shows you and close to the last thing that decides your result. When a bot places hundreds of orders a month, the things that quietly matter are execution, stability and how easily you get your money back out.

Does the broker actually allow what your bot does?

Check the account terms for hedging, scalping and expert advisors before anything else. Some accounts prohibit holding opposite positions on the same symbol, which breaks a hedge recovery system outright. Others restrict orders held for less than a set number of seconds. A strategy that is against the terms will be profitable right up until the profits are voided.

Execution beats spread

A raw account showing 0.1 pips looks better than one showing 1.2 — until you add commission and measure how often you are filled away from the requested price. Run a bot on a small live balance for two weeks and compare the fills in the trade history against the entries the strategy asked for. That difference, not the marketing figure, is your real cost.

Two weeks of live data from a small account is worth more than any spread comparison table.

Server stability during news

The moment that reveals a broker is the first minute after a big US release. Requotes, a frozen terminal or a rejected stop-loss modification in that window will cost more in one day than a year of slightly wider spreads. Ask other traders how a broker behaved during the last few high-impact releases — not how it behaves on a quiet Tuesday.

Withdrawals

Test this early with a small amount. Speed and predictability of withdrawal tell you more about how a broker is run than any regulatory badge on the homepage. A firm that pays within a day, every time, has its operations in order.

The brokers we use

We keep accounts with Vantage, XS, XM and Exness, and we run the same bot on more than one so a single broker's outage never takes the whole book offline. These are partner links — opening through them costs you nothing and supports the free tools we publish.

The boring checklist

Nothing on that list is exciting. All of it shows up in the equity curve eventually.

Need help picking? We'll tell you honestly.

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Strategy

Backtest vs live: reading results without fooling yourself

26 June 2026 · 7 min read · King Trading Zone

Every EA for sale comes with a backtest that rises from bottom-left to top-right. Producing one of those is easy. Producing one that means something is not. Here is what we check before a strategy is allowed near live money.

Modelling quality is a floor, not a verdict

A 99% modelling quality report only says the tick data was dense. It says nothing about whether the spread used matched reality, whether swap was applied, or whether the strategy would have been filled at those prices. Set the spread in the tester to your broker's average, not its best, and switch commission on.

Test through the periods that hurt

A backtest starting in 2021 tells you how a strategy handled a trending market. Include 2020 and 2022. Include the weeks around major central bank surprises. If a system has never been tested through a regime it will eventually meet, you do not know how it behaves there — you only know it has not met it yet.

A curve with no ugly stretch in it usually means the test period was chosen after the fact.

Four numbers past the equity curve

Change one input and see what happens

Take a working setting and move it ten percent in each direction. A robust strategy gets slightly worse. A curve-fitted one falls apart. The same applies to the start date — shifting the test window by a month should not change the conclusion.

Forward test before you scale

Run the strategy on a small live account for a month, then compare live results with a backtest over that exact same month. If they diverge sharply, the cause is usually spread, slippage or fills — and it is far cheaper to learn that on a small balance.

Expect live results to be worse

They always are. Slippage, requotes, the occasional missed entry and the weeks you interfere by hand all take their share. If a strategy is only viable when the backtest's numbers hold exactly, it is not viable. Give yourself a margin: assume live performance around 70% of the tested figure and check that you would still be satisfied at that level.

The question worth asking

Before the numbers, ask what the strategy actually exploits. A trend follower on gold has a reason to work — gold trends. A system with no explanation beyond "the backtest is good" has found a pattern in noise, and noise does not repeat on schedule.

Want a second opinion on a backtest?

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Prop firms

Running an EA in a prop firm challenge

19 June 2026 · 6 min read · King Trading Zone

Plenty of challenges fail while the account is still in profit. Not because the trading was bad, but because a rule was broken that the trader never read. Automation makes this worse: a bot follows its instructions perfectly, including the ones that violate the agreement.

1. Is the EA allowed at all?

Some firms permit expert advisors freely, some ban them, and many sit in between: your own bot is fine, a commercially sold one is not, and a bot that many funded traders run simultaneously counts as prohibited copy trading. Get this answer in writing from support before you pay the fee.

2. How is the daily loss limit measured?

This clause ends more challenges than any other. Some firms measure from the previous day's closing balance, others from peak equity, and the difference is enormous for a strategy holding open positions overnight. Floating losses usually count. A grid sitting in a 4% unrealised drawdown can breach a 5% daily limit without closing a single trade.

Set the bot's own daily stop below the firm's limit, and have it halt rather than hope.

3. What happens at the weekend and around news?

Each of these needs to be a filter inside the EA. Remembering to do it manually works until the one Friday you are away from the screen.

4. Minimum trading days and consistency rules

A bot that hits the profit target in three days can fail a challenge requiring ten trading days. A newer and stricter rule caps how much of your total profit may come from a single day — clear the target in one lucky session and the payout is denied. Configure the bot to trade at a steady pace rather than sprinting.

Before you load the bot

Read the rulebook, write each rule down as a number, and confirm the EA has a setting that enforces it. If a rule cannot be enforced in the bot, it will be broken eventually.

5. Lot size limits and scaling

Firms usually cap the maximum lot size and total open volume. An EA that sizes as a percentage of balance can exceed that cap on a larger account without warning. Set a hard maximum in the inputs, below the firm's limit, and test that the bot respects it.

A realistic view

The challenge is a risk-management exam wearing the costume of a profit target. The most reliable approach is dull: small size, the same routine every day, a daily stop that triggers well before the firm's, and no attempt to finish early. Passing slowly still pays.

Running a challenge? We'll configure the limits.

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