Risks

An account smaller than the maximum drawdown would have been emptied in this backtest, before counting the margin your broker requires to hold the position. Future drawdowns can be larger than past ones. On NQ, which is 10 times the size of MNQ, every figure above is 10 times larger.

Our own budget calculation, with the margins and monthly costs, is on the budget page. It is a calculation from the backtest, not investment advice.

• Leverage. Futures and CFDs are leveraged. A small move in the index is a large move in your account. With futures you can lose more than your deposit.
• CFDs. Most retail accounts that trade CFDs lose money. Your broker publishes its own percentage.
• Gaps and fast markets. A stop loss is an order, not a guarantee of price. In a gap or a fast market it can fill well beyond the stop level.
• Changing markets. The edge in the backtest is small (profit factor about 1.2 after costs). It can shrink or disappear when market behavior changes. The forward test and our monthly reports will show if that happens.
• Concentration. About 17% of the backtest profit came from one day, 9 April 2025. Without days like that, results are lower.

• Different costs. The backtest uses $2.00 per round turn on MNQ. Your broker may charge more. Strategy 1 trades often and makes little per trade, so higher costs reduce its result quickly.
• Different prices. CFD prices follow the cash index, not the futures contract, and spreads widen overnight. Results on a CFD will differ from results on futures.
• Execution. Slippage, requotes, rejected orders and a slow connection change results.
• Contract roll. MNQ and NQ expire every quarter. If the expert advisor stays on an expiring contract, it stops finding good prices. See the FAQ on how to move to the next contract.

• It only works while MetaTrader 5 runs. If your computer sleeps, restarts or loses the connection, trades are not opened or closed by the expert advisor. Stops and targets already sent stay at the broker.
• Clock. The trading windows depend on a correct clock. The computer or VPS must have the correct time and time zone. The expert advisor warns if they look wrong, but it cannot fix them.
• Settings. A wrong instrument profile, lot size or symbol changes the risk. Check the panel after you attach it.
• Other programs on the same account. On a netting account, a position from another program or a manual trade on the same symbol blocks new trades. On any account, other programs use the same margin.
• Untested cases. Hedging accounts have been tested in the Strategy Tester but not yet in a live forward test. The NAS100 CFD profile is still in testing.

The rules were developed with data from the same period as the backtest, which makes it in-sample. A backtest does not include every real-world effect, such as partial fills, outages or your own decisions to stop or change the program after losses. Read the full risk disclosure.