REGULATOR — Break & Retest Log

A book is its rule and its account together: change either and the epoch is retired and a new one opens. ⛔ Results from two epochs are never pooled — a different account is a different broker, different spreads and a different cost per trade. A retired book’s own journal is kept under journal/archive/.

The short version

This is a trading program that watches six markets — gold, two currency pairs and the three big US stock indices — and takes a specific kind of trade automatically. This page is its diary: every setup it looked at, and why it did or did not take it.

The trade it looks for

Prices tend to stall at particular levels — places where the market has turned before. The program finds those levels by itself, on the four-hourly chart, with no lines drawn by hand, and then watches the 15-minute chart for the trade.

Then it waits for three things in order. Price has to break through a level and close beyond it. It has to travel away, so a brief poke through does not count. And then it has to come back and touch that level again and hold. That last part is the retest, and it is the whole idea: a level that used to stop price should now support it from the other side.

Why most setups are refused

⭐ This is the part worth understanding, because it is most of what you will see here. A setup can look perfect and still be declined — the spread is too wide that second, the trade would be against the bigger trend, a position is already open, the level simply is not good enough, or the level was broken and never came back to be retested.

Every refusal is written down with its reason. A strategy is defined as much by what it declines as by what it takes, and a filter nobody can see is a filter nobody can improve.

What happens once it is in

It risks 0.1% of the account on each trade, and never guesses the size — it is calculated from the distance to the stop-loss.

When the trade is up by the amount it originally risked, it banks a third. The remainder runs for twice the risk. The stop does not move.

⭐ The break-even move is switched off, and that was a finding. On fourteen months of history it lifted the win rate from 34% to 48% and cost about 12R: it turned losers into scratches, which flatters the win rate, while cutting short the few large winners the shape depends on. Win rate is exactly the number a break-even rule is built to improve, and it is the number that fooled us for a day. ⚠ A win rate on this page that looks low is the rule working, not failing — the remainder runs to about 3.1× what it risks, so the break-even point is about 24.5%, not the 33% a 2:1 target would need.

⚠ What this does not claim

It runs on a real, funded account (Upcomers Thunderbolt 1M). The numbers on this page are from a handful of trades, which is far too few to say whether the strategy makes money.

⛔ Measured properly, it has no demonstrated edge. Over 27 months and 357 trades the edge before costs is zero — and costs are about −0.03R a trade, so the account loses at roughly the price of trading. Seven configurations in a row looked good on the data they were chosen on and reversed on data they had not seen. ⚠ An earlier version of this page said the raw signal was positive on every instrument before costs. That was arithmetic error, not a finding: the tool computing it added the commission back onto a number that never contained it. Corrected, the edge before costs is +0.018R across 481 forex trades, which is indistinguishable from nothing, and it is negative on one of them.

⭐ So this page is not a claim that the strategy works. It is a record of a system whose entry rule has no measured edge, running on forward data nobody can search afterwards.

The point of all this machinery is not to prove it works. It is to make the thing answerable: when there are enough trades to judge, the answer will come from a record rather than a feeling.

Reading the page

Right now is live state. The record is the totals, for the live book only. The pack breaks it down per instrument. The research tables are folded at the bottom. R means multiples of what was risked — a trade that makes 1R made exactly what it stood to lose.