Summary
The Opening Range Breakout is a Premium mechanical strategy for the CTrader platform. The strategy can be used to pass trader funding programs
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Index
Prequisites
To properly use this strategy you should have available the following prequisites
- cTrader trading software. with any cTrader broker. I use IC Markets cTrader version
- automated-trading.ch Account with Premium Subscription
Important Disclaimer
We strongly recommend that you never run your algorithmic trading systems on your hard-earned real money. You should always minimize your risk and run your strategies on trader funding programs so that the maximum amount your risk to lose is the monthly subscription fee you pay those programs.
The Opening Range Breakout strategy is based on entering on a signal generated by analyzing market behaviour in regard to a price range formed around the first minutes of the trading session. The strategy provides a very flexible entry setup based on that breakout concept
The strategy will start by detecting the opening range, the opening range is a range defined as a an interval that can be parametrized, but in general terms, the opening range should be located around the opening market hour of the instrument. The opening range can, for example, be defined between 09:30 EST and 09:35 EST (spanning 5 Minutes) or from what is know as Cash Open from 08:30 EST to 09:30 EST. One should experiment with different intervals and seek the most adapted interval for each instrument.
The second step of the strategy is to wait for a breakout of the price from the opening range. The strategy will wait for the price to retest the range as the first required condition before deciding to open a trade. After the retest, the strategy will wait for the price action to show a strong breakout in the direction of the initial retest. Precisely, the strategy will look for a Faire Value Gap that will be the trigger to enter a trade, or the strategy can be set to an immediate mode which will enter trade at the close of a bar without waiting for Faire Value Gap to occur. Also the strategy will look for these entry conditions to occur before a certain time limit for the day. Generally speaking, the more you wait for the price to breakout the more the price can get far away from the initial price range, so I put a time limit to 11:00 EST, meaning no trades will be allowed to be triggered after 11:00 EST. Off course this is a parameter that you can modify.
Entering a trade is an important part for any strategy, bu what is more important is managing the trade. The strategy allows to manage the trade with many management methods.
Along with the initial setting of the Stop Loss price, a Take Profit price and a dynamically set Quantity to maintain a Fixed Risk per trade which is a crucial part of any strategy
profitability on the long run.
The Stop Loss price can be set to Fibonacci levels calculated on the retracement on the opening range zone.
Entry Setup Examples
Example #1: Entry Setup on US500
On this first example entry setup which is run on US500 index on the 1 Minute Timeframe, the opening range is set to span from 09:30 to 09:34 EST. And a Faire Value Gap is required for entering a trade after price retrace to the opening range. The stoploss on this example is set to the 61.8% fibo retracement of the range and the take profit is set to 3:1 win loss ratio. As you can see the price retraced back to the opening range than a strong bullish move took place which made the strategy opens a trade long. The time on the chart is UTC+2
Example #2: Failed first entry then winning 2nd Entry on US500
On this second example, the same settings as the first above example are used. 1 minute timeframe and on US500 instrument. You can see on this example that the strategy can open multiple trades as long as the trading window is still active. On this example the trading window ias active until 11:00 EST. The first trade was a loss, then the 2nd trade was open with a 3:1 win loss ratio and it was a win. The second trade was open because the price action respected ou entry rules, first it broke below the range low, then retraced into the range and broke again below with a strong FVG
Example #3: No trade on choppy price action
On this example we can see the effect on waiting for a Faire Value Gap before entering a trade. On the chart below, no trades were open because the choppy price action didn't create a Faire Value Gap. As you can notice this is a good thing since if a breakout trade was open it would have been a loss
Features
The Opening Range Breakout strategy has a set of unique features:
- No pending orders are placed: only market orders
- Full-auto strategy that can be scaled into multiple instances
- Precise backtesting capabilities based on tick level
- Robust In-house Order management library.
Here I further explain some of the features of the strategy in more details
Dynamic Quantity and Risk Management
As all our strategies, this strategy implements two methods to set quantity for open positions.
- Fixed Quantity: This method will use the same quantity value for each position. If the stoploss is variable between positions (by using a dynamic stop loss value), The win/loss will be also variable between positions
- Dynamic Risk Adjusted Quantity: This method will calculate quantity of each position based on multiple factors:
- The stoploss of the position
- The maximum risk (in $ currency value) allowed for a position to take
- The maximum quantity allowed for a position to take
Position Management
As all our strategies, this strategy implements a stop trailing method that will trail the stop loss of the position based on a trigger and a trailing amount
Apart from this position management method, the strategy allows to set the stop loss based on multiple strategies and to set the take profit based on a ratio based method. Check the parameters section for a detailed explanation
Account Management
The strategy implements daily stop-trading triggers based on the Net winning position count, the Net losing position count or when a target realized Net profit is reached. or when a target net loss is reached.
Parameters
We try to keep the parameters to minimum. We only left the most important parameters to be set
| License | |
| License | This is the license key you get when you create an account on automated-trading.ch. After creating an account, copy your license key from the billing page. You need to set this parameter only once per month, once the license key is validated it will be remembered for the rest of the month. |
| General | |
| Daily TakeProfit Target | The strategy will stop when the daily TakeProfit amount is reached after a position is closed. When set to 0, this parameter is ignored |
| Daily StopLoss Limit | The strategy will stop when the daily StopLoss amount is reached after a position is closed. The value of this parameter is positive. For example if the value is set to 300, the strategy will stop when the Realized PnL is lower or equal to -300$. When set to 0, this parameter is ignored |
| Stop @ Winning Count | This will make the strategy stop trading if the net count of winning trades for the day is equal to the value of this parameter. This parameter is ignored if equal to 0 |
| Stop @ Losing Count | This will make the strategy stop trading if the net count of losing trades for the day is equal to the value of this parameter. This parameter is ignored if equal to 0 |
| Order Label | The parameter will let you set a Label that will be suffixed to all positions sent to the broker. This is useful in case you want the positions sent to the broker to have a specific value to differentiate them from positions created by other strategies |
| Render Opacity (1-100) | Sets opacity used to draw th opening range zone |
| Entry Setup | |
| Time Zone |
This parameter sets the time zone to be used for setting the Trade Time parameter below. Since futures markets are open and closed based on US market time zone which is EST (US Eastern, New York), this parameter allows you to specifiy trade time interval on another timezone which is your local machine timezone
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| Open Range Time (hh:mm-hh:mm,...) | This sets the opening range interval. Example : 09:30-09:35 will define an opening range spanning from nine-thirty to nine-thirty-five AM. The tim zone is specified by the previous parameter. After this interval is finished, the range will be drawn in the chart marking the its high and low prices |
| Start Trading From (hh:mm) | This parameter sets when the trading should start after the opening range has started. In most cases you would want trading to start as soon as the opening range has formed, but sometimes you would want to wait some time before the strategy starts trading. |
| Allow Trading Until (hh:mm) | This parameter sets when the trading should stop after the opening range has formed. This time will restrict new trades to be open but will not affect already open positions to be managed. |
| Cutoff Time (hh:mm) | This parameter sets when to close all open trades before the trading session ends. This is important to avoid Swaps added to your positions due to passing into a new trading session. The default value of this parameter is 15:30 which is adapted to EST timezone. |
| Entry Mode | This parameter sets the entry mode after a retest of the Opening Range zone
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| Quantity & Risk | |
| Quantity Strategy |
This parameter sets how the quantity should be set for a Trade
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| Max Quantity | This parameter sets the maximum allowed quantity when the Risk Adjusted method is selected. This option is very useful since some propfirms has order quantity limits that can cause the account to be invalidated |
| Order Qty | This parameter is only used if the Quantity Strategy is set to Fixed. This parameter sets a fixed quantity of each trade. |
| Order Management | |
| Order Management Strategy |
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| Stop Loss Management | |
| StopLoss Strategy |
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| Stop Loss Points | This parameter is available if the Stop Loss strategy is set to Points |
| Target Risk Per Trade ($) | This sets the max risk in dollars for one position.
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| Max Allowed Risk Per ($) |
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| Take Profit Management | |
| TakeProfit Strategy |
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| Take Profit Value | This sets the take profit in dollars for the open position If you use the Fixed Currency Value as a take profit strategy And it will set the take profit in points for the open position If you use the Points as a take profit strategy |
| Scale out % Qty at % Target | This option will enable a scaling out mechanism that consists in closing a percentage of the position quantity when the price hits a certain percentage of the the profit target. The value calculated is rounded to the lower value if the percentage value calculated is fractional. For example, if the position is a 5 quantity positions, and the quantity percentage of this parameter is set to 50%, the quantity closed will be 2 (lower end of 2.5) |
| Scale out at % Target | This parameter sets the percentage of the profit target that will trigger the scaling out mechanism |
| Scale out % Qty | This parameter sets the percentage of the quantity that will be closed during the scaling out mechanism |
| Price Breakeven | |
| Enable Price Breakeven | This parameter will enable/disable breakeven mechanism based on price |
| Price Breakeven Strategy | This parameter sets how the price based breakeven should be calculated
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| Price Breakeven Trigger | This parameter is available if Price based Breakeven is enabled This parameter sets the trigger value in points or in percentage (value from 1 to 100) that needs to be reached in order to set the stoploss of the current position to breakeven |
| Trailing Stop Parameters | |
| Trailing Stop Strategy | When the Classic Trail Stop method is selected, this parameter let you chose on which basis the trailing will be calculated
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| Trailing Stop Trigger | When the Classic Trail Stop method is selected, this parameter sets the trigger (in Points or in Ratio) |
| Trail Amount | When the Classic Trail Stop method is selected, this parameter sets the amount (in Points or in Ratio) to be trailed when the trigger is hit |
Backtesting and Preferred Settings
Here I will try to periodically list backtests with different risk appetit. But before that here are some remarks regarding backtesting
- Past results are not guarantee of future results. All backtesting results are for indicative purposes only
- The period on which the backtest was run was not handpicked to show the best results
- Commissions are included in the backtests to get as realistic results as possible.
- Instrument US500 (S&P 500)
- Timeframe 1 Minute
- Period From 01 January 2024 to 31 March 2025
- Run Mode Backtest
- Total Profit 13 086 $
- Max Drawdown (-36%) $
- Run Release Version 1.0.0.0
- Instrument DE30 (DAX)
- Timeframe 1 Minute
- Period From 01 January 2024 to 31 March 2025
- Run Mode Backtest
- Total Profit 9 582 $
- Max Drawdown (-38%) $
- Run Release Version 1.0.0.0
Download & Installation Instructions
At automated-trading.ch you can chose to either purchase monthly subscription to use our premium products, or use our free products without subscribing
In both cases, you need to create an account so you can get a License that you can use for both premium and free products
To obtain the license simply Signup and then get your license on the billing page
This Opening Range Breakout strategy is a premium strategy. It can be run on Backtest and Optimization modes for free. Whereas an active subscription is required to run it on Live mode.
To download and install the strategy follow the instructions below
- Click on the below download button to download the Opening Range Breakout Strategy file
- To install the cBot you should double-click on the extracted .algo file and let cTrader install it. When you double-click on the .algo file, you will see your installed instance of cTrader start and prompt a dialog box asking to approve installation. You should click Yes
- The cBot requires FullAccess Access Rights to be able to perform License checking on the network and persistance on your Disk
- Next, open a new chart window on cTrader Trade section and add the ATCHOpeningRangeBreakout cBot to the Chart
- You should be able to add the cBot to the chart by Selecting ATCHOpeningRangeBreakout from the cBot menu as shown on the image below
- At this stage, you should copy/paste your license number into the License parameter, you can find your license number Here
- You can also load a parameter template by clicking on the Folder icon as highlighted on the image above.
- After hitting the Start button, the license will be verified
- If your License was not successfully recognized. You will see an error message on the Chart. Otherwise the cBot is added to the Chart successfully
- You should see the cBot added to the chart as shown on the image below. Click on the Play button to start the strategy
Frequently Asked Questions
General
Using a VPS is good but not imperative. Check out our resources page to get a discount through our affiliate LINK
Yes! You can run multiple instances of this strategy on the same account but each instance should be run on a unique instrument
You should avoid running multiple instances on the same account on the same instrument
I designed this strategy to be full-automatic strategy. So yes this cBot can be run on autopilot, even though you should check it from time to time to verify and external issues such as cTrader platform issues or broker connectivity issues
You should consider full auto-trading over manual trading for many reasons:
- Trading 24/7: Automated trading strategies don't need to go to the bathroom not it need to take a break
- Better execution, faster and more precise
- Eliminate psychology and sentiments
- Can be scaled to dozens if not hundreds of instances
- Automated trading can generate truly "passive" income, manual trading is just another "more stressful" job
Yes, If you have an idea that you believe can improve the performance of this strategy, I will be more then happy to hear from you. Please use the contact page to send me a message
No, the source code of the strategy is protected for copyright reasons
Billing
Yes, you can cancel your subscription from the account page at any time to prevent future payments. We cannot refund the unused portion of your subscription, but you will be able to use your subscription even after cancelling for the remainder of the billing cycle.
No, we don't offer a trial subscription plan. But you can download and test the strategy in backtest and playback modes before subscribing
We do not offer full or partial refunds, but you may cancel your subscription at any time to stop future payments.
Skeptics
I have been a professional software developer since 2010. I have been developing automated trading strategies since 2012, for my self for fun and profit and also been developing strategies for clients all over the world
I have always been invlolved professionaly in the business of Finance and Investing, I have worked for trading brokers and investment banking.
I'm not a marketer, and I don't hire someone else to develop my strategies.
This strategy has been favorable for me on the long run with ups and downs, especially when it is run on multiple insturments. But the question remains pertinent, why I'm selling it?
The answer is I'm not selling it, I'm renting it to generate an additional income and diversify my different sources of income besides what this strategy can generate. Which you should also do. You should not rely on one source of income to reach financial independance, the key is diversification.
The edge of this strategy will not disappear if many people start using it. This strategy is purely mechanical and does not rely on a hidden quantitative pattern that should not be disclosed
Lets examine pros and cons of pending orders
- Pros:
- Best price execution when using limit orders
- Protection against losses in case of connectivity issues
- Cons:
- Can get rejected on high price volatility
- Delay between request to place the order and when it gets placed. Price volatility can cause the order to be rejected and the price to run away
- Requires management: any opposite orders need to be canceled
- Visible to the broker, placed orders can be manipulated
After years of developing strategies I reached the conclusion that market orders are better suited for the context of automated trading.
The main drawback of using pending orders is the fact that they can be rejected which is very hard to manage especially in a volatile environment
In all our strategies, we use market orders even for take profit and stop loss. Lets examine the pros and cons of market orders
- Pros:
- Guarantee of execution reagrdless of volatility conditions
- Invisible to the broker before they get submited
- No risk of being rejected which means better protection for stop loss
- Faster execution than pending orders
- Cons:
- In the case of the connection being lost with the broker, the strategy will be unable to send market orders
Release Notes
- First Release of the strategy
User Comments & Feedback
You can find feedback of our users and ask questions about this strategy by joining our discord community by following this invite link or clicking on the Discord logo image. Joining is completely free