Entry 309 / 11 / 2026
The news gate changed nothing.
Same EA, same year, gate on and gate off: profit factor 0.86 both ways. The gate fired 357 times and withheld six entries. Verdict written the same day: news timing is not where this strategy loses money. The losses come from the payoff shape, winners near $9 and losers near $25. The next lever is a TP1, TP2 and stop sweep, not more filtering.
Entry 209 / 11 / 2026
The Specialist goes live beside the terminal.
A Python service next to MetaTrader, not inside it. Calendar, fixed rules, headlines, a local model that may only tighten, one line written to the terminal's common folder every five minutes. The EA reads it each minute and defaults to trading if the line is missing or stale. Forward test started on a demo account the same day.
Entry 108 / 28 / 2026
First full year on the tester.
514 trades, 73.74% won, 4.68% max drawdown, net −$97 on $10,000. The code held: weekend close every Friday at 17:45, re-entry gating as designed, no stuck positions. The one real finding was that a win pays about a third of what a loss costs, which is a strategy conversation, not a code fix.