The Factory · its record
Wilcox
XAG/USD · daily candles · fixed stops · prices from Darwinex’s MetaTrader 5. Found by BotFactoryFX in the 24/7 factory on 5 November 2026; in quarantine since 6 November 2026.
Why “Wilcox”. Price action, so a poet: Ella Wheeler Wilcox, who wrote “Laugh, and the world laughs with you”, was born on 5 November 1850, the same day of the year this strategy was found.
Simulated, no real money. Its backtest and its quarantine run on a simulated account; no order is sent to any broker. Its rules, settings and code are not published: this record shows what it did, not how it decides.
Its backtest
What the strategy did on the history it was tested on, from 4 January 2015 to 24 September 2026, as BotFactoryFX measured it when it went into quarantine, with the costs it pays there. A simulated account of 10,000 in the market’s currency, with a fixed size; every figure in % of that account.
- Trades
- 141 in 11.7 years, 1.0 a month
- Won
- 51%
- Profit factor
- 2.52
- Result
- +230.8%
- Worst drawdown
- −20.7%
- Average per trade
- +1.64%
- Average win · average loss
- +5.32% · −2.21%
- Best trade · worst trade
- +14.80% · −12.72%
- Longest losing streak
- 9 trades in a row
- Years in loss
- 3 of 12
The result, trade after trade
Its drawdowns
How far below its previous high it was at each closed trade: what you would have had to sit through.
Year by year
The first and the last year are only part of a year.
| Year | Trades | Result | Bar |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2015 | 10 | +6.4% | |
| 2016 | 9 | +25.0% | |
| 2017 | 10 | −1.6% | |
| 2018 | 8 | −6.5% | |
| 2019 | 14 | +9.2% | |
| 2020 | 18 | +35.2% | |
| 2021 | 12 | +8.9% | |
| 2022 | 7 | +6.9% | |
| 2023 | 11 | −6.1% | |
| 2024 | 14 | +39.6% | |
| 2025 | 19 | +63.0% | |
| 2026 | 9 | +50.8% |
How it was found and judged
BotFactoryFX found it in the 24/7 factory on 5 November 2026, the best of 2,538 candidate rule sets that search tried on XAG/USD, daily candles.
- Judge’s score
- 85/100 · Solid
- On a similar market
- XAUUSD: 81/100 · Solid (correlation 0.78)
- Judged on
- history the search never saw, from 14 February 2023
- History it was found on
- from 25 July 2014 to 30 October 2026, 3,729 candles
- Checks measured
- 13 of 13
Almost half of what it made in its backtest (49 %) came in 2025 and 2026, when silver more than doubled and then fell by almost a third.
The judge is BotFactoryFX’s Reality Check: 13 checks on the strategy, nine of them on history the search never saw. Our bar to put one in quarantine is Solid, 75 or more, on its own market and again on a similar one, judged from the same date.
The judge’s report, check by check
The search that found it on 5 November 2026 kept its score but not this report, so on 6 November 2026 we judged it again exactly as then: same history, costs and cut-off date. It gave the same score: 85/100, Solid. Holds up, including on other instruments and other timeframes. No check failed outright.
Out of samplePassed−0 %
Does it still work on history it never saw?
Profit factor 2.69 in sample, 2.68 out of sample.
Period consistencyWarning5 / 6
Does the edge hold across time, or was it one lucky stretch?
5 of 6 windows closed in profit. The best window alone is 48% of the gains — the result leans on one stretch rather than repeating.
Walk-forwardPassed2.09
On history it never saw, would it survive being re-tuned as you went along?
Re-tuned on past data only, the forward trades come out at profit factor 2.09 over 49 trades, profitable in 3 of 4 windows; the tuning picked different settings in 1 of them.
Other instrumentsPassed100 %
Does the edge exist anywhere else, or only here?
The same rules stay profitable on XAUUSD. An edge that survives a change of instrument is harder to explain away as a fit to this history. There it was measured only from 2023-02-14, the stretch this one never saw: before that is the history it was built on. Its distances in pips were scaled to each instrument's typical bar: XAUUSD ×4.61.
Other timeframesWarning0 %
Does the edge survive on another clock, or only on these bars?
Rebuilt on other clocks almost nothing survives — H4 1.15 · W1 0.45, against 2.78 on the original. That is the signature of a rule set fitted to this exact sequence of bars, though a strategy can also be genuinely specific to one timeframe.
Better than chancePassedP98
On history it never saw, does it beat that same history with the direction of each bar drawn at random?
On 89 versions of the held-back history with the direction of each bar drawn at random, the same rules beat this result 2 times. Profit factor 2.68 here against a median of 1.07 with the directions drawn at random — the rules are reading the direction of the moves, not just their size.
Parameter sensitivityPassed100 %
Does it still work, on unseen history, if the numbers were slightly different?
Nearby settings keep 100 % of the edge — a plateau, not a lucky point.
DrawdownPassed11.5 %
How deep underwater did you have to sit? A warning only: it does not count toward the score.
Your statement would show 9.1 %, but open positions were 11.5 % underwater at the worst point — that is what you would actually have had to hold through.
Monte CarloPassedPF 1.47
On history it never saw, how bad does it look if the trades had fallen differently — or without its best ones?
Resampling the 53 trades it took on unseen history 1000 times, the profit factor of the worst 5 % is 1.47 one by one, 1.56 in blocks of 4 consecutive trades, and 2.24 skipping one in ten at random; the worst of the three, 1.47, is the score. Without its 3 best trades it is 2.16.
Sample sizePassedt = 2.5
On history it never saw, is the average trade distinguishable from zero?
Over 53 trades on unseen history the average result stands 2.5 standard errors from zero — short of the 3 this asks for, so the edge could still be noise. The three best account for 19 % of gross profit.
Cost tolerancePassed> 30 pips
How much broker cost can it absorb before the edge dies?
The edge is far larger than any plausible execution cost.
PerturbationPassed100 %
On history it never saw, does it hold up if that stretch had begun elsewhere and its prices had wobbled?
Started at 40 random points of the unseen stretch with prices nudged by up to 15% of ATR, it keeps 100 % of its edge — profit factor 2.68 untouched against 2.68 in the middle of the runs, and 2.03 in the worst tenth.
Bar resolutionPassedunambiguous
Does it hold up when measured on finer bars?
No exit depended on the order in which the high and the low happened inside a bar, so nothing here rests on an assumption about it.
What the report does not cover
- Everything above was measured on 3,729 bars — 12 years 3 months, 2014-07-25 to 2026-10-30. Nothing here was tested outside that window.
- That window does not include the 2008 collapse, so no check above could tell you what this strategy does in one.
- Deflated Sharpe: counting the 2,538 rule sets the search tried, there is a 13 % probability that this strategy's Sharpe on the history it was chosen on is more than luck — 0.289 per trade over 88 trades, against 0.374 expected from the best of that many rule sets with no edge. The spread of the tried rule sets' Sharpes is taken as that of strategies with no edge, because the search does not record it yet. It looks only at the stretch where the strategy was chosen: a pattern that was real there and then stopped, or a flaw in the data, scores as high as an edge.
- This was the best of 2,538 different rule sets the search tried. What a search that size scores on data with no edge in it was measured on hourly currency pairs, not on this instrument and timeframe, so there is no reference figure for it here: the more candidates a search tries, the more likely its best is best by luck.
Live, in quarantine
Since 6 November 2026, on prices it had never seen, with closed trades only.
Quarantine verdict: No trades yet
| Its backtest promised | Live so far | |
|---|---|---|
| Trades | 141 in 12 years | 0 in 2 days |
| Won | 51% | — |
| Profit factor | 2.52 | — |
| Result | +230.8% | — |
| Worst drawdown | −20.7% | — |
At its backtest’s pace, by now it would have closed about 0.1 trades and made +0.1%.
Its closed trades
No closed trades yet.