Strategy Bots Explained: Rule-Based Automation for Forex, Gold and Crypto

A strategy bot is an automation that trades from price charts using fixed written rules. It looks at candles, the bars that show where price opened, closed and how high and low it went in each period, and checks them against a pattern. When the pattern appears and every condition is met, it places a trade with a stop loss and targets. When the pattern is not there, it does nothing.

This is different from copy trading, where a human expert decides each trade, and from digit bots, which trade very short random contracts. A strategy bot is closer to a disciplined manual trader who has written their plan down and follows it exactly, every hour of every trading day, without getting tired or impatient.

Beginners often expect a bot to be busy. Good strategy bots are the opposite. Each one is built around a single kind of opportunity, and it is only worth trading when that opportunity is clearly there. Some days a bot takes two trades; some weeks it takes none.

While it waits, a DONKOFX strategy bot reports its current decision in plain words in the activity feed, for example that the higher timeframe trend is flat or that no setup has formed yet. A quiet bot with a clear reason is working as designed. A bot that trades constantly, by contrast, is usually trading noise and paying spreads for it.

DONKOFX currently offers four strategy bots. Three of them look for a well-known price action pattern; the fourth runs a grid. Each has its own guide page with every setting explained.

Candle Range Theory starts from a simple observation: a strong candle on a higher timeframe defines a range, and price often runs beyond one end of that range to trigger the orders resting there before moving the other way. That run beyond the range is called a sweep.

CANDLE KING marks a range candle, waits for one of its extremes to be swept, and then evaluates an entry when price returns into the candle's body. The stop goes beyond the sweep, where the idea would be wrong. A range that is too old is ignored, so the bot does not trade stale levels. When the setup works, the move back through the range can be fast and give a good reward for the risk. When it fails, price keeps going beyond the sweep and the stop is hit.

Many traders buy when price breaks above a recent high and sell when it breaks below a recent low. Often those breakouts fail: price pokes through, the breakout traders pile in, and then price closes back inside the range and reverses. Fading those failures is an old idea, often called turtle soup after the famous Turtle breakout traders whose entries it trades against.

TURTLE PROTOCOL looks back over a set number of candles for the recent swing high and low. When price sweeps one of them and the candle closes back inside the range by more than a small buffer, it treats the breakout as failed and trades back towards the range. In a strong trend, breakouts tend to succeed, and this kind of setup loses more often; in ranging markets it tends to suit better.

A Fair Value Gap appears when price moves so quickly that three consecutive candles leave a space: the high of the first candle and the low of the third do not overlap in a rising move, or the reverse in a falling one. Many traders treat that gap as an imbalance price is likely to revisit.

FAIRVALUE SNIPER finds gaps above a minimum size, ignores gaps older than a set number of candles, and evaluates an entry when price retraces into a gap that has not yet been filled. The stop goes beyond the gap with a small buffer. Gaps are common, so the size and age filters do much of the work of keeping only the clearer ones.

IRONVAULT is different from the pattern bots. It first decides the trend direction using moving averages on its own timeframe, hourly by default, confirmed on the four-hour chart. It then opens a position with the trend and adds further positions of exactly the same size as price pulls back, each with its own take-profit. All levels share one basket stop beyond the last level.

Because no level is ever larger than the first, the worst case of a basket, every level filled and the stop hit, is known before the first order and sized to the risk you chose. The full explanation, with a worked example on gold, is in the guide to gold grid trading.

CANDLE KING, TURTLE PROTOCOL and FAIRVALUE SNIPER can trade gold (XAUUSD), silver, Bitcoin and Ethereum, and major forex pairs such as EUR/USD, GBP/USD and USD/JPY, on MT5 and cTrader accounts. They can also trade Deriv volatility indices on a Deriv account, using Multiplier contracts with a fixed take profit and stop loss. IRONVAULT trades on MT5 and cTrader only, with gold as its default market.

The broker directory explains which brokers connect through MT5, cTrader or Deriv. Contract sizes, minimum lots and spreads differ between brokers, and every bot reads your broker's own specification when it sizes a trade.

Every strategy trade has a stop loss before it opens. You set the maximum risk per trade: the most one trade may lose if the stop is hit. The bot measures the distance from entry to stop and calculates the position size so that the loss at the stop is about that amount. A trade with a wide stop gets a small position, and a trade with a tight stop a larger one, so the risk stays constant.

On MT5 and cTrader, if even the broker's minimum lot would risk more than you allowed, the trade is refused with a message rather than sized up. Before every start, the screen also checks the session loss limit and your account exposure ceiling, and a strategy session's profit target must be at least as large as its loss limit.

Strategy bots describe targets in R, where one R is the amount the trade risks. The STANDARD profile, for example, splits a trade into legs that take profit at 1.5R, 2R and 2.5R. After the first target is reached, the remaining legs move their stop to the entry price, with an optional small buffer, so the rest of the trade can no longer become a full loss under normal fills. From a chosen R level, the stop can then trail behind price.

You can also limit the number of trades per day, stop for the day after a number of losses, wait a set time after each trade, and restrict trading to chosen sessions or UTC hours. On gold with five-minute to thirty-minute charts, short-timeframe safety rules switch on automatically and limit entries to the London and New York overlap, among other protections.

None of these mean a bot is broken. They are the normal cost of any rule-based approach, and they are why risk per trade should stay small.

Start with the market you understand or want to learn, often gold. Read each bot's guide and pick the one whose idea you can explain in a sentence. Prefer a calm profile such as SHADOW or STANDARD on fifteen-minute or hourly charts before trying faster settings.

Run it on a demo account for at least a few weeks. Read the activity feed: how often does it trade, why does it skip, how are trades closed? Then review the completed trades and check that losing streaks and drawdowns are ones you could sit through. Only then consider a small real balance, with risk per trade around 0.5% to 1% of the account. Running a strategy bot alongside a copy automation under one account exposure ceiling is a common way to keep activity steady without stacking too much risk.

MT5 accounts connect to DONKOFX through a hosting service that keeps the account online while a bot runs. To avoid keeping an account hosted when there is nothing to do, MT5 strategy bots stop for the day once their daily limit is reached and nothing is open, by default. You can switch this off if you prefer the bot to keep waiting for the next day.