Quick Start Guide

Follow these steps to have Impulse live and trading in under ten minutes. The trading logic itself is pre-configured and fixed — you only need to set a few account-specific options below.

Step 1 — Add XAUUSD to Market Watch

Impulse trades XAUUSD exclusively. Open Market Watch (Ctrl+M) and make sure your broker's Gold symbol is visible before attaching the EA.

Step 2 — Attach the EA

1. Open a XAUUSD chart Any timeframe is fine — the chart timeframe does not affect how the EA operates.
2. Drag Impulse onto the chart Find it in the Navigator panel under Expert Advisors and drag it onto the chart, or double-click it. The Properties dialog opens at the Inputs tab.

Step 3 — Set Your Inputs

See the Input Reference section for the full list. At minimum, check:

• Lot size — start conservatively (e.g. 0.01 on accounts under $1,000).
• Magic numbers — defaults are fine unless you run other EAs on the same account.
• Which strategy modules to enable — all six are on by default.
• Trade mode — leave on Recovery (Grid) unless you specifically want single-position trading.
• Entry mode — leave on Standard to start.
• Strategy 6 entry engine — leave on New Entry Engine unless you have a specific reason to change it.
• Grid Spacing — leave on Wider to start. Standard holds more positions in a prolonged move against a basket; Widest holds fewer.

Step 4 — Whitelist the News Filter URL (Recommended)

The News Filter is on by default. Before clicking OK, see News Filter Setup below to whitelist the required URL — otherwise Impulse falls back to MT5's built-in calendar automatically, which works but is less complete. The filter also pauses new baskets if it cannot verify calendar data at all, so it is worth having a working source on both sides.

Step 5 — Enable Algo Trading and Click OK

In the Common tab, ensure "Allow Algorithmic Trading" is checked, then click OK. A smiley face icon should appear top-right on the chart confirming the EA is running.

Trade Modes & Entry Style

Two inputs at the very top of the Properties dialog set the overall character of the EA before anything else is considered, and a third governs Strategy 6 alone. All three are independent of each other and of which strategies you enable.

Trade Mode

Recovery (Grid) — the default and the mode Impulse was designed around. When a signal fires, the EA opens a position and, if price moves against it, adds further positions at intervals, closing the whole group together once the combined result reaches its target. Individual trades have no stop loss; risk is managed at the account level by the margin and drawdown safeguards. This mode produces a high proportion of winning closes with occasional deep, long-running drawdowns.

Single Position (SL/TP) — one trade per signal, with a broker-side stop loss and take profit attached at entry. Nothing is ever added to the position. Losses are capped and visible per trade, but you should expect a lower win rate and a very different equity curve. Grid spacing, grid expansion, and TP scaling inputs are ignored in this mode; the Single Position Settings group applies instead.

Entry Mode

Standard uses the entry requirements the EA has always used. Conservative raises the bar for every strategy: each one still trades, but far fewer signals qualify and those that do occur in cleaner, better-defined conditions.

In practice, Conservative means fewer trades, longer idle periods, and — because more marginal entries are skipped — typically shallower drawdowns and lower total turnover. As a rough guide it opens around a quarter as many baskets as Standard, at a higher win rate. Standard means more opportunities taken and more time in the market. Neither is universally better; Conservative suits smaller accounts, cautious risk appetites, and traders who want the EA to be selective, while Standard suits those who want the system working more often.

Strategy 6 Entry Engine

Strategy 6 is the only module with a second, independent character switch of its own, in input group 11. New Entry Engine is the default and the more selective of the two, taking fewer trades in better-defined conditions. It checks the hourly picture before committing, and stands aside when a sudden burst of activity has no wider momentum behind it. Legacy Entry Engine is more permissive and trades more often.

Most users should leave this on New. Legacy exists for traders who prefer the more active engine, or who want to compare the two side by side on their own broker's data. The choice only changes how Strategy 6 decides to open its first position — as with entry mode, everything that happens after a trade is open is identical either way.

The Control Panel

When the on-chart panel is enabled, Impulse displays a live overlay in the top-left corner of the chart showing current status, which of the six strategy modules is currently running, account figures, and a couple of key price levels while a position is open. A CLOSE EA TRADES button in the panel header lets you manually close everything Impulse currently has open, without removing the EA from the chart.

Two short-lived reference lines may also appear directly on the chart while a position is active, marking the next likely trading level and the current target — both disappear automatically once the position closes.

The panel also includes a strategy readiness display — a row of status boxes, one per strategy, showing at a glance whether each is waiting, armed and watching for its trigger, actively running the current grid, or locked out while another strategy's basket is open. An H4 trend indicator sits alongside for quick market context.

The panel scales automatically to your screen's display resolution so it stays crisp on high-DPI, scaled, and remote-desktop sessions. If you prefer manual control, the scale, font, and base font size can each be overridden from the inputs.

The News Filter indicator shows whether trading is currently blocked or clear; hovering over it reveals the blocking or next upcoming event by name, the time trading resumes or pauses, and a warning if calendar data hasn't refreshed recently. When parallel grid mode is enabled, the status line, profit totals, readiness cards, and chart lines all track each strategy's basket independently.

The Dashboard at a Glance

The panel is laid out in a dark, high-contrast layout and shows a considerable amount of account context in one place:

• Four headline figures across the top — live floating profit on open trades, today's realised profit, today's peak-to-trough drawdown as a percentage, and cumulative profit since the EA was first run.
• Account balance and equity shown directly beneath.
• Status chips for each of the six strategies plus the current entry mode, so you can confirm at a glance what is switched on.
• A configuration strip summarising trade direction, Friday handling, drawdown protection, trade mode, lot sizing, spacing, live spread, and take-profit scaling. Several of these have hover tooltips with the full detail.
• Six readiness cards — one per strategy — showing whether each is waiting, armed, actively running, or locked out while another basket is open, with a colour legend along the bottom.

The daily drawdown figure tracks Impulse's own trading only, so manual trades, other EAs, and deposits or withdrawals on the same account will not distort it. In Single Position mode the panel's labelling adapts automatically, showing the position's stop loss and take profit in place of grid levels.

Further Panel Detail

• Drawn as a single image. The panel is rendered as one bitmap rather than as a hundred individual chart objects — faster to draw, lighter on the terminal, and able to hold its place at the front of the chart alongside overlay tools and trade managers.
• Precise text sizing on scaled displays. Font handling has been reworked so the panel holds its designed proportions on high-DPI, scaled, and remote-desktop sessions.
• Frozen-state reporting. If a drawdown freeze mode is active and the threshold has been reached, the drawdown cell reads FROZEN, the status line carries a warning tag, and the next-grid level is replaced with FROZEN — a clear signal that baskets will run to target but will not deepen.
• Clearer News Filter states. The indicator now distinguishes an active news window from a calendar that cannot be verified. BLOCKED in amber means data is unavailable or stale and new baskets are being held back; UNPROTECTED in red means data is unavailable and you have chosen to keep trading anyway. Hovering gives the reason in full.
• Strategy 6 engine shown on its card. When the Legacy entry engine is selected, the Strategy 6 readiness card is labelled S06-Legacy.

Input Reference

The tables below list every user-configurable input in Impulse v2.40, in the order they appear in the Properties dialog. Inputs are grouped into thirteen numbered sections.

1 — Trade Mode & Entry Style

2 — Strategy Selection

3 — Position Sizing

4 — Risk Management

5 — Single Position Settings (SL/TP mode only)

6 — Grid Engine (Recovery mode only)

7 — Take Profit (Recovery mode only)

8 — Trade Filters

9 — Trading Schedule

10 — News Filter

11 — Strategy 6

12 — Display & Panel

13 — Advanced

Drawdown Modes Explained

The drawdown safeguard measures the combined floating result of every open basket, including swap, against your chosen threshold. What happens when that threshold is reached depends on the mode:

Each of these is offered twice — once with the threshold read as a percentage of balance, once as a dollar figure. The percentage forms scale with the account; the dollar forms hold a fixed ceiling regardless of balance.

The freeze modes exist because closing a deep basket at its worst point locks in the loss the grid was built to recover. Freezing instead caps how much worse the position can get — no new exposure is added — while leaving the existing basket the room to work its way back. It is a live check, re-evaluated every minute: if floating drawdown recovers back above the threshold, grid additions and new entries resume automatically with no restart needed.

Automatic Lot Sizing — Risk Levels

When Lot calculation method is set to Automatic (Risk Level), position size scales with account balance. Each level opens 0.01 lots per fixed dollar amount of balance, as shown below.

Grid Expansion & TP Scaling

These two features work together and are both on by default in Recovery (Grid) mode. Grid expansion changes how a basket is built: once it passes a chosen depth, each new position is placed further from the last than the one before it. That means a basket accumulates volume more slowly during a sustained adverse move, reducing worst-case exposure — but it also sits further from price on average, so recovery takes a larger move in your favour.

Grid Spacing sets how strongly that applies. Standard holds a constant gap until the 6th position, then widens gently. Wider — the default — starts widening from the 3rd position and does so more steeply, so a basket caught in a long run against it ends up holding noticeably fewer positions. Widest goes further again. Custom lets you set the starting position and the rate yourself.

Every choice behaves identically for the first two positions, so the great majority of baskets — the ones that open, run a short distance and close — are unaffected by this setting. It only changes what happens when a basket keeps going against you. Wider and Widest reduce how much is at stake in that situation, and reduce the profit taken from it in the same proportion; there is no setting here that removes the risk.

TP scaling changes how a basket exits: instead of always closing for the same small target, the target grows as the basket grows. Deep baskets therefore aim for a result proportionate to the risk taken, rather than closing flat after a long hold. The trade-off is longer holding times, since a bigger target takes more of a move to reach.

Parallel Grid Mode

By default, Impulse runs one grid basket at a time — when any strategy opens a basket, the others wait until it closes. Setting Only one strategy grid open at a time to false enables an experimental parallel mode in which each enabled strategy can run its own basket simultaneously, with fully independent grid spacing, take-profit targets, and cooldowns per basket. The panel and chart lines track each basket separately.

News Filter Setup

The News Filter pauses new entries around major USD economic releases. It works out of the box using MT5's built-in calendar, but for the most complete event coverage, whitelist the URL below once per installation.

1. Open Tools → Options in MetaTrader 5 Press Ctrl+O, or use the Tools menu.
2. Go to the Expert Advisors tab Tick "Allow WebRequest for listed URL" if it isn't already checked.
3. Add the URL Click Add and enter exactly:
   https://nfs.faireconomy.media/
4. Click OK, then restart the EA Remove Impulse from the chart and re-attach it (or restart MT5) so the new permission takes effect.

Fail-Closed Protection

Impulse distinguishes between two situations that can look identical from the outside: a calendar that genuinely has nothing coming, and a calendar that cannot be read. A quiet weekend with no high-impact releases in the next two days is perfectly normal, and trading continues as usual. A feed that times out, returns something unusable, or a terminal with no calendar data at all is a different matter — in that case the EA holds off opening new baskets until a source can be verified again.

This gating applies to basket starts only. Anything already open carries on exactly as normal: grid additions, targets, breakeven handling, and closes are all unaffected, so a calendar outage can never strand a live basket.

Behind the scenes, the filter refreshes from ForexFactory every four hours, switches to MT5's calendar immediately if that source is unavailable, and retries frequently while neither is responding. Each refresh is built and validated separately before it replaces the live data, so a verified calendar always stays in force until a good replacement is ready. The panel's staleness warning measures time since the data was last verified.

Strategy Tester

Impulse can be backtested in MetaTrader 5's Strategy Tester.

Support

All purchases include access to ongoing updates, priority support, and an invite to the Starpoint Trading private community.

Please include your broker name, account type (ECN / STP / market maker), and a brief description of the issue. A screenshot of the EA's Experts log tab in MetaTrader 5 is always helpful.

Starpoint Trading — Algorithmic systems built for the serious retail trader.