IlanShort answer: Dark Dione is a free expert advisor built on the Dark Breakout indicator, and we have traded it in a live $1,000 account since December, roughly seven months and past the 200-day mark. Our results have been steadily profitable: around 3% per month on average, a profit factor of 2.66, and a withdrawal already taken out of the account. The catch, and it is a significant one, is that the equity drawdown reached close to 40% along the way, which is a lot of pain for a four-figure account to absorb.
Most traders will tell you that free EAs do not work. Our experience says something more nuanced: free does not mean poor quality, but it also does not mean low risk.
What We Tested, and What We Have Not
Being specific about scope matters more in this category than almost any other, because free robots attract screenshots rather than records.
Here is ours. One live account, $1,000 starting balance, opened in December and running continuously since.
- Broker: IC Markets
- Instrument: CHF/JPY
- Starting lot: 0.02
We have also run the same EA on one of our funded accounts, which is a different risk profile entirely and not the basis for the numbers below.
Things I cannot tell you yet:
- How the system behaves across a full market cycle. Seven months is not one.
- Whether the settings that worked on CHF/JPY hold up on other pairs. We tested many currencies in backtesting; live, we only run this one.
- How it handles a genuine liquidity event. It has not met one.
- What happens on a broker with wider spreads. Our conditions are unusually good.
All of the live tracking is published on the Algo Trading Space platform. Go to Results, then Live Trading, then search for the EA. Nothing here is a screenshot you have to take on trust.
Worth saying plainly: we publish the systems that disappoint us as well as the ones that work. Reviewing only winners would be easier and considerably less useful, and the whole reason we run our own capital through these robots is so nobody else has to spend money finding out. This one happened to perform. Several others have not.
Dark Dione Live Results: The Numbers
| Metric | Result from our live account |
| Account size at start | $1,000 |
| Live since | December |
| Duration | Over 200 days, about seven months |
| Average monthly return | Roughly 3% |
| Profit factor | 2.66 |
| Gross profit | About $265 |
| Net profit after fees | About $249 |
| Maximum equity drawdown | Close to 40% |
| Withdrawal taken | $240 |
| Balance after withdrawal | Around $1,009 |
| Pair traded | CHF/JPY |
| Starting lot | 0.02 |
One honesty note on those figures. Our Account Tracker, the app we built in-house to monitor every account we run, shows slightly different totals from the raw MetaTrader terminal depending on whether fees and the withdrawal have settled. The tracker reports about $250 net; the terminal showed a total near $261 with $249 current. Small variance, nothing suspicious, though I would rather explain it than have someone spot the discrepancy and wonder.
Scrolling through the closed trades in the tracker, the majority came out profitable. Losers exist, obviously, and they cluster around the two drawdown stretches you can see on the equity curve rather than appearing evenly across the seven months. That pattern is typical of grid behavior: long runs of small wins, punctuated by periods where the basket sits underwater.
VIP members have access to that same tracker, which is where the account-level detail lives.
The 40% Drawdown Deserves Its Own Section
Here is where I want to slow down, because this single number should shape how you think about the entire system.
An equity drawdown near 40% on a $1,000 account means that at the worst moment, roughly $400 of open floating loss was sitting on screen. It recovered. Then a second drawdown period arrived, and that recovered too. Both times the strategy did what it was built to do.
But consider the arithmetic against the return. Averaging 3% monthly while risking 40% of equity is a ratio that demands respect rather than enthusiasm. Compare it to what happens when the recovery does not come: a grid system that keeps adding while price runs one direction can turn a 40% floating loss into a 70% one faster than most people expect, and there is no stop loss coming to save the basket.
What would I have done differently? Honestly, I am not sure I would have changed the settings, since they came out of a lot of backtesting. What I would change is the expectation. Anyone looking at 3% per month and mentally spending it should look at the drawdown chart first.
Three practical consequences:
- Position size for the drawdown, not the return. If a 40% equity swing would make you close everything at the worst moment, your lot size is wrong regardless of what the backtest says.
- Do not add capital during a drawdown. Topping up an account mid-recovery feels like risk management. It is usually the opposite.
- Watch the basket, not the individual trades. With grid logic, a single losing position tells you nothing. The open exposure across the basket is the real number.
How Dark Dione Actually Trades
The EA is one of the Dark series from Marco Solito, and it is described by the developer as a fully automatic system for medium-term trading built on the Dark Breakout indicator. So the entry signal is indicator-based rather than a pure price-action rule, and breakout logic sits at the core of it.
What we observed in our own baskets lines up with that description. Positions open at 0.02, and when the market moves against the initial entry, recovery trades follow at 0.04, 0.06, and 0.08.
Notice what those numbers are not. A martingale would double: 0.02, 0.04, 0.08, 0.16, 0.32. Instead the progression here adds incrementally. That is a meaningful distinction, and it was deliberate on our part rather than a default. Grid, yes. Martingale, no.
Which brings us to the setting that matters most.
The Grid Setting That Changes Everything
Inside the EA’s properties there are three options for how recovery trades are sized:
| Grid mode | Behavior | Risk profile |
| Martingale | Each recovery trade multiplies the previous lot | Highest; losses compound quickly |
| Lots Sum | Adds to the position based on the size of currently open positions | Moderate; growth is additive rather than exponential |
| Fixed Lots | Every recovery trade opens at the same size as the first | Lowest; slowest recovery |
We run Lots Sum. That choice came out of many rounds of backtesting across multiple currencies, and it is the reason our progression climbed gently rather than exploding. Someone running the identical EA on Martingale would be trading a fundamentally different system with our name on it.
Our other key parameters:
- Entry lots: 0.02. Small, deliberately, on a $1,000 balance.
- Money management: off. We use a fixed starting lot rather than letting the EA scale with balance. Auto-scaling on a grid system is how accounts disappear.
- Instrument: CHF/JPY. More on why below.
The full set file goes to our VIP Club members, alongside private videos, the resource library, and Discord access to our whole team. That runs €49 a month. I am mentioning it because people always ask where the exact parameters live, not to turn this review into a pitch.
Why CHF/JPY, and Why Spread Matters at 0.02 Lots
CHF/JPY is a minor cross, which normally means a wider quote and more cost per trade. On our IC Markets account the spread showed a minimum of 0.1 pips and averaged 0.86.
That number does more work than it appears to. When your starting position is 0.02 lots and the EA opens multiple recovery trades per basket, spread cost is not a rounding error; it is a meaningful share of what each basket earns. Good conditions are frequently the line between a profitable account and an unprofitable one, and the effect is sharpest in small accounts where every basket carries the same fixed cost against a smaller return.
IC Markets is well regulated, among the larger brokers globally, and built in a way that suits algorithmic trading, with spreads starting from zero pips on their raw accounts. We hold several accounts with them for exactly that reason. If you want to check the execution yourself before committing money, open a demo first; there is no reason to fund anything until you have watched the spread column on your own terminal.
I should be balanced here, though. A broker with tight pricing does not make a grid EA safe. It makes it cheaper to run. Those are different things.
What “Free” Actually Costs
Dark Dione is genuinely free. Sign up on the developer’s site, order it, and you receive 10 flexible licenses immediately, usable across up to 10 accounts at once, MetaTrader 4 or MetaTrader 5, demo, live, or funded.
Ten licenses on a free product is unusually generous. We run it on our live account and on a funded account simultaneously, which would be impossible with most paid EAs at this price point, since paid systems typically restrict you to one or two real accounts.
So where does the money go? A few places:
- The indicator. The developer sells the Dark Breakout indicator separately at $49 as a one-time purchase, alongside equivalent indicators for the other robots in the range. The EA itself remains free.
- Your time. We ran many, many backtests across multiple currency pairs to arrive at the configuration we use. That work is the real cost, and it is not optional.
- Your risk. A free system that draws down 40% costs exactly as much as a paid one that draws down 40%.
Free software, in other words, does not mean free trading. It means the software line on your spreadsheet reads zero while every other line stays the same.
The Dark Family, and a Small Aside About Naming
Dark Dione sits inside a range of related robots from the same developer:
| EA | Signal source | Style |
| Dark Venus | Bollinger Bands | High-frequency scalping |
| Dark Moon | Dark Moon indicator | Scalping |
| Dark Mimas | Dark Oscillator | Scalping, counter-trend by default |
| Dark Dione | Dark Breakout | Medium-term trading |
| Dark Rea | Dark Sprint | Impulse trading |
Dark Venus is the most downloaded of them by a wide margin, and independent reviewers note that Dark Venus can be profitable with the right settings and strict risk management, while its grid elements make losses spiral when neither is present. That assessment matches my own view of the whole family, including this one.
Now the aside, which is entirely tangential and I am including it anyway because it made me smile. Dione, Rhea, Mimas, and Tethys are all Saturnian satellites, icy moons circling the same planet. Dione in particular carries darker material across its trailing hemisphere with bright ice cliffs cutting through it, which is a rather good visual for a robot named Dark Dione. Venus, of course, is a planet rather than one of the icy satellites, so the naming scheme breaks at exactly one point. Someone at the vendor presumably liked the sound of it. Fair enough.
None of this affects trading. I just think it is more interesting than another paragraph about profit factors.
Who Should Run This, and Who Should Not
It may fit if:
- You already understand grid mechanics and have watched a basket go underwater without panicking
- You can size positions so that a 40% equity swing is survivable rather than terminal
- You trade with a broker offering genuinely tight pricing on the pair you select
- You are willing to do your own backtesting rather than copying settings blindly
- You want to test across several accounts at once, which the 10 licenses make easy
Wait, or look elsewhere, if:
- This would be your first automated system. Start with something that uses a hard stop loss.
- You need the account balance for anything in the near term
- You plan to switch grid mode to Martingale because the returns look better in testing
- Watching a $400 floating loss on a $1,000 account would make you intervene manually
That last one is not a small consideration. Manual intervention in the middle of a grid recovery is the single most common way traders convert a temporary drawdown into a permanent loss.
What Could Go Wrong
Reviews that only list features are not much use, so here are the failure modes I would actually watch for.
- A sustained one-directional move: Grid systems need mean reversion or at least a pause. A trend that runs without retracement builds floating loss with no natural exit. Our two drawdowns both recovered; a third might not.
- Auto-scaling switched on: Money management that grows lot size with balance sounds sensible until the grid opens during a bad stretch at the larger size. We keep it off for that reason.
- Settings copied without testing: Our configuration suits CHF/JPY at IC Markets with a $1,000 balance. Change any of those three variables and the parameters may no longer make sense.
- The DLL requirement: The Dark EAs need DLL imports enabled in MetaTrader before they will trade at all. Miss that box and nothing opens, including in backtests, which sends people chasing problems that do not exist.
- Broker conditions drifting: A spread averaging 0.86 pips today may not hold during volatile sessions. The manual is worth reading on how the EA handles execution during those windows.
My Verdict on Dark Dione
Can you make money with a free EA? Based on 200-plus days of our own live capital, yes. Roughly 3% a month, a profit factor of 2.66, a real withdrawal taken out of a real account, and every trade published openly rather than described.
Would I call it low risk? No, and I would push back on anyone who does. The 40% drawdown is the defining feature of this system, more than the returns are. What made it work for us was the combination of a small fixed starting lot, Lots Sum instead of Martingale, money management switched off, and a broker whose pricing did not eat the edge.
Change any one of those and you are running a different system. That, more than the software being free, is what determines whether this ends well.
You can find the full setup details, current results, and download information on our Dark Dione EA page.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does Dark Dione use a stop loss on individual trades?
Grid systems generally manage risk at basket level rather than per position, which means individual trades may close in loss while the group closes in profit. Anyone accustomed to fixed stop loss trading should understand this difference before running the EA live. Practically, your risk control comes from starting lot size, grid mode selection, and account balance rather than from a stop level on any single order. Review the user manual for exact behavior.
Can I run Dark Dione on a funded or prop account?
The license permits up to 10 accounts at once across MetaTrader 4 and MetaTrader 5, covering demo, live, and funded setups, and we run it on one of our funded accounts alongside the live one. Prop firm rules are the real constraint, since many impose maximum drawdown limits well below the roughly 40% equity swing we recorded. Check your firm’s daily and overall drawdown thresholds before attaching it to anything funded.
Which timeframe and pair should I use?
We trade CHF/JPY, arrived at through extensive backtesting across multiple currencies rather than preference. The developer designed the EA for medium-term trading, and settings that suit one instrument rarely transfer cleanly to another. Test any alternative pair with real tick data before committing capital, and pay particular attention to typical spread on minors, since cost per basket rises quickly on wider quotes and erodes returns in smaller accounts.
Why do I need to enable DLL imports?
The Dark series requires DLL imports enabled within MetaTrader’s expert advisor options, otherwise no orders open, and this applies during backtesting too. Traders frequently assume the EA is broken when the actual issue is an unchecked box in the platform settings. Enable it before attaching the robot to a chart. If trades still fail to appear, verify that automated trading is switched on at the terminal level and that your broker permits EAs.
How much capital do I need to start?
Our live account began at $1,000 with a 0.02 starting lot, which produced a drawdown of roughly $400 at its worst point. Smaller balances running identical settings would face proportionally identical swings with less room to absorb them psychologically. There is no minimum imposed by the software itself, so the real question is what floating loss you can watch without intervening. Size the lot to that answer.
What is the difference between Dark Dione and Dark Venus?
Both come from the same developer and share grid mechanics, though their signals differ substantially. Dark Venus scalps using Bollinger Bands at high frequency, making it the most downloaded free robot on MQL5. Dark Dione targets medium-term positions through the Dark Breakout indicator, so trade frequency is lower and holding periods longer. Neither is inherently safer; risk in both cases depends on grid mode, starting volume, and account sizing.
Where do I get the exact settings you use?
Our full set file goes to VIP Club members, along with private videos, the resource library, and direct Discord access to our team, at €49 monthly. I would still encourage running your own tests rather than treating any published configuration as permanent, since broker conditions and market behavior both change. Settings that performed well across our backtests on one pair at one broker are a starting point for your own work, not a guarantee.
Is the Dark Breakout indicator required to run the EA?
The expert advisor itself is free with 10 flexible licenses. The developer sells the underlying indicator separately at $49 as a one-time purchase for traders who want the signal on their charts independently of the automated system. Running the EA does not require buying it. Anyone wanting to see entry signals manually, or combine the color-coded readings with discretionary trading, may find the standalone tool worth the cost.
Our VIP Club gives members the Account Tracker, live trading results, set files, private videos, and Discord access to the team. If you would rather have the whole configuration built for you, our premium setup covers portfolio construction, broker account preparation, VPS hosting, and MetaTrader configuration.
Disclosure: Algo Trading Space may earn a commission from some links on this page. It does not change our figures, our results, or our conclusions.
Risk warning: Trading leveraged products carries a high risk of losing money rapidly. Grid systems can accumulate substantial floating losses, and past results, including our own live account, do not indicate future performance. The figures here come from a single $1,000 account traded over roughly seven months with specific settings at one broker. Trade only with capital you can afford to lose. Nothing on this page constitutes investment advice.
