Petko AleksandrovDark Kronos vs Dark Nova is a comparison between two members of the same Dark family of Expert Advisors. Both are martingale robots that trade a multi-pair basket and add to losing trades, so they compete for the same buyer. This page is for traders who already accept that mechanism and want to know which one put less of the account at risk.
The deciding difference fits in one sentence: as of August 6, 2026, Dark Kronos’s worst drawdown on our accounts was 62%, against 37% for Dark Nova, even though both won exactly 72% of their trades.
Everything below comes from our own live trading, not vendor claims. Dark Nova has a 12-month record with us and Dark Kronos has 8 months, both drawn from a tracking set of 527 live and funded accounts and 122,837 closed trades.
Affiliate disclosure: some links here, including the “Try Now” buttons, earn us a commission if you buy, at no extra cost to you. Commissions never change the figures.
Key takeaways
- Dark Kronos and Dark Nova are both multi-pair martingales that pile onto losing positions; EURGBP heads Kronos’s basket and AUDCAD heads Nova’s.
- Both recorded a 72% win rate, beside worst drawdowns of 62% for Dark Kronos and 37% for Dark Nova.
- Dark Kronos’s worst open loss reached 75%, the deepest of any martingale we have tracked, while Dark Nova’s peaked at 19%.
- Returns ran from −10% to +11% for Dark Kronos over 8 months, and from −10% to +126% for Dark Nova over 12 months, alongside the drawdowns above.
How did we track Dark Kronos and Dark Nova?
We ran both robots on accounts we fund ourselves, so every figure is a verified result rather than a customer’s statement.
Two measures do most of the work:
- Worst drawdown is the largest fall in total account value from a high point to the following low, counting closed and open losses and ignoring deposits or withdrawals. A drop from $10,000 to $6,000 is a 40% drawdown.
- Worst open loss shows how far underwater the unclosed trades went at their deepest point. It exposes robots that sit on losers while the balance still looks calm.
Read as a pair, they reveal a risk profile. An open loss as large as the drawdown, or larger, signals losing positions being held; a drawdown clearly larger than the open loss points to losses that were actually closed. This is live tracking, not a controlled experiment, and the martingale accounts we run skew young, so many have not yet faced their worst month.
What is an EA, and which type are these two?
An Expert Advisor is a program that places trades on its own inside MetaTrader 4 or MetaTrader 5. MetaQuotes’ documentation separates trading robots from indicators: an indicator analyzes the chart, while an EA attached to a chart can open and close positions whenever automated trading is permitted. The terminal must stay running for the robot to act, which is why many traders host it on a remote server.
For the setup basics, start with what an EA in forex is.
Every robot we track falls into one of six types: martingale, grid, scalper, intraday, swing or trend-following. That trading strategy label, set out in our guide to EA strategy types, decides which robots can replace one another.
Dark Kronos and Dark Nova are both martingale robots. When a position moves against them, they add trades at a bigger size so a smaller recovery can close the group in profit. That is the source of the smooth stretches, and of the rare, very large losses.
How do Dark Kronos and Dark Nova compare side by side?
They share a mechanism and a win rate, then split sharply on everything that measures risk. All figures are as of August 6, 2026.
How they trade
| Dark Kronos | Dark Nova | |
| Strategy type | Martingale | Martingale |
| Markets traded | Multi-pair (EURGBP leads) | Multi-pair (AUDCAD leads) |
| Typical holding time | Days to weeks | 1 to 3 days |
| Trades open at once | Several | Several |
| Adds to losing trades | Yes | Yes |
| Best suited to | Large risk budgets that can absorb very deep open losses | Traders who accept martingale risk and want the shallower, longer record |
Live results
| Dark Kronos | Dark Nova | |
| Tracked for | 8 months | 12 months |
| Win rate | 72% | 72% |
| Return range across accounts | −10% to +11% | −10% to +126% |
| Worst drawdown | 62% | 37% |
| Worst open loss | 75% | 19% |
I did not expect two robots from one family, with identical win rates, to be 56 points apart on worst open loss. That gap is the whole story.
What did each robot do on our accounts?
Here is each robot’s mechanism, followed by its live numbers.
Dark Kronos
Dark Kronos is a martingale: when its basket goes against it, it opens further trades at a larger size and waits for a recovery to close the lot. Its basket spans several pairs, with EURGBP the single biggest though no pair accounts for 60% of activity. Positions typically last days to weeks.
Over 8 months, Dark Kronos’s results ranged from −10% to +11% as of August 6, 2026. Its worst drawdown reached 62% and its worst open loss 75%, with its 72% win rate sitting beside that 62% figure. An open loss deeper than the drawdown tells you Kronos sat on its losers rather than closing them.
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Dark Nova
Dark Nova uses the same recovery logic, adding larger trades to a losing basket instead of taking the loss. AUDCAD leads its basket, and it normally closes out within one to three days.
Across 12 months, Dark Nova’s accounts returned between −10% and +126% as of August 6, 2026. The worst drawdown was 37% and the worst open loss 19%, while its 72% win rate sat beside that 37% drawdown. Here the drawdown runs well above the open loss, so more of Nova’s damage came from booked losses than from positions left open.
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How do they differ, criterion by criterion?
They differ on risk depth, holding time and lead pair, and not at all on mechanism.
Mechanism
Both add to losing trades, so neither offers structural risk control of the kind a single-position robot has. If that is a dealbreaker, this explainer on martingale EAs sets out why. What our data cannot show is how aggressively each one scales, only that both do.
Risk shape
This is where the pair splits. On a hypothetical $10,000 account, Dark Kronos’s worst open loss equals roughly $7,500 of unrealized damage on screen, against about $1,900 for Dark Nova.
Across 67 martingale accounts in the broader dataset, the typical drawdown was 8%, a bad month (the worst 10%) reached 32%, and the deepest ever recorded was 93%. Both robots have gone past that bad-month line. Nova passed it modestly; Kronos nearly doubled it, and its 75% open loss is second only to one grid robot across our entire directory.
Market and session
Both spread trades across several crosses, which is why the pairing holds up, but the leading pairs differ: EURGBP for Kronos, AUDCAD for Nova. That matters if you already run other robots on either pair, since stacked exposure to one cross adds up quickly. Session detail for each robot sits in its tracker above.
Trade frequency and holding time
Dark Nova usually finishes a basket inside its 1-to-3-day window. Dark Kronos can hold positions for days or even weeks, which means more nights and weekends in the market and, at most brokers, more swap charges.
Suitability
- Prop firm challenge: neither suits a tight maximum loss rule. If your evaluation caps losses below 37%, both recorded deeper falls on the accounts we run; our beginner’s guide to prop firm challenges covers the rules that usually decide it.
- Small account: martingale sizing needs room, and a broker’s minimum position size limits how finely a robot can scale on a modest balance. Kronos’s 75% open loss makes this worse.
- Long-term holding: Nova’s record runs 12 months against 8, and its top result finished at +126%, paired with its 37% drawdown. Kronos’s top account reached +11%, next to 62%.
Who should choose Dark Kronos, and who should pick Dark Nova?
The answer depends on how much open loss you can watch without intervening. Which of these sounds like you?
- Choose Dark Nova if you want a multi-pair martingale from the Dark family and can live with a 37% worst drawdown, logged across a year of tracking with returns of −10% to +126%.
- Choose Dark Kronos only if you specifically want EURGBP-led exposure and can fund an account where a 75% open loss would not force you out. I find that a hard profile to recommend.
- Look at the rest of the family if you like the mechanism but not Kronos’s depth. Dark Titan, a direct alternative listed in our directory of tracked robots, recorded a 24% drawdown over 10 months with returns of −10% to +111%.
- Skip both if you refuse robots that add to losers. Perceptrader AI, an AUDCAD-led grid that never scales into losing trades, peaked at a 4% open loss but still drew down 37% over 12 months, returning +4% to +5%.
What goes wrong when these robots hit a bad stretch?
Both did what martingales do: they kept adding to losing positions and let the account absorb the damage until price recovered or the basket closed in the red. The consequences looked very different.
At its low point, Dark Kronos had open trades three-quarters underwater. A trader watching that account would have seen a balance barely moving while equity collapsed, and that is when people make their costliest calls: topping up to keep the robot alive, or switching it off at the bottom.
Dark Nova’s bad stretch was shallower but still real. A 37% drawdown with only a 19% open loss means losses were taken rather than carried, which feels worse in the moment and is arguably healthier for the account.
Both ranges also bottom at exactly −10% as of August 6, 2026 (Kronos across 8 months with its 62% drawdown, Nova across 12 with its 37%), so owners of either robot could reasonably reach opposite conclusions.
Here is what an experienced trader would do before switching either one on:
- Size the account against the worst open loss, not the typical month.
- Write down an equity level at which the robot gets stopped, before the first trade.
- Refuse to add fresh money mid-drawdown just to keep a basket alive.
- Host the terminal so a dropped connection never leaves positions unmanaged; this guide to choosing a forex VPS provider lists what to check.
Verdict: Dark Kronos or Dark Nova?
On every risk measure in our tracking, Dark Nova came out ahead of Dark Kronos: a 37% worst drawdown versus 62%, and a 19% worst open loss versus 75%, as of August 6, 2026. Its record is also longer, and its best account stronger.
I would not call Dark Nova safe. A 37% drawdown sits beyond the bad month for martingales in our data, and a year is still a short record for this type. But between these two, the choice is not close.
If I were buying today, I would choose Nova, size it for a drawdown deeper than anything it has shown so far, and keep watching the tracker.
FAQs
Are Dark Kronos and Dark Nova the same robot with different settings?
Dark Kronos and Dark Nova behave like two different robots, whatever code they share. Our tracking cannot confirm whether one engine sits underneath both, but the live behavior splits: Kronos leads with EURGBP and holds for days to weeks, while Nova leads with AUDCAD and rarely holds past three days. The gap in worst open loss, 75% against 19%, is too wide to treat them as interchangeable. Judge each on its own tracker rather than on the shared Dark name.
Are all Dark robots martingales?
Most Dark robots in our directory are martingales that add to losing trades, but not all of them. Dark Titan, Dark Nova, Dark Kronos, Dark Gold, Dark Venus and Dark Algo all use martingale recovery, while Dark Dione trades CHFJPY as a swing robot that does not add to losers. The markets vary too: Dark Gold and Dark Venus trade mostly gold, Dark Algo trades EURUSD, and the rest run multi-pair baskets. Only robots sharing a market work as genuine alternatives.
Does an identical win rate mean identical risk?
An identical win rate says almost nothing about risk, and Dark Kronos and Dark Nova prove it. Both won 72% of trades in our live data, yet Kronos recorded a 62% worst drawdown and Nova 37%. US regulators make a related point: the CFTC has warned that trading bot promoters often advertise near-perfect win rates alongside outsized return claims. For a martingale, a high win rate is built in, because the robot adds to losers until price returns; the rare failure is what counts.
What happens if a martingale basket runs short of margin?
When a martingale basket runs short of margin, the broker closes positions for you, usually at the worst moment. Under the CFD measures ESMA introduced in 2018, EU brokers must close out retail positions once margin falls to 50% of the minimum required, and negative balance protection caps losses at the deposit. A robot scaling up while its basket is underwater approaches that line faster than one holding a single fixed trade, so Dark Kronos’s 75% open loss deserves serious attention.
Do I need a VPS to run Dark Kronos or Dark Nova?
A remote machine is strongly advisable for Dark Kronos and Dark Nova, because both hold baskets overnight and an EA only acts while its MetaTrader terminal is running. If a home computer sleeps or loses connection, open trades keep moving against you with no robot managing them. Kronos, with the longer holds, carries that exposure longest. Check uptime, location and support before paying for any server; our hosting comparison for EA traders explains the options.
Can a backtest show the risk these live figures reveal?
A backtest rarely shows the risk that live figures like Dark Kronos’s 75% open loss reveal. Vendor backtest insights tend to rest on fixed spreads, perfect fills and parameters tuned to past data, while live accounts face slippage, swap charges and variable execution. For that reason, our comparisons rely only on real-money accounts. Our article on why backtest results differ from live trading lists the specific causes worth checking before you buy any expert advisor.
Related reading
- Dark Venus EA review
- Dark Dione EA review
- Aussie Victor MT5 review
- How to recover from a trading loss
- How to spot forex EA scams
Sources
- ESMA, “ESMA agrees to prohibit binary options and restrict CFDs to protect retail investors,” March 27, 2018: https://www.esma.europa.eu/press-news/esma-news/esma-agrees-prohibit-binary-options-and-restrict-cfds-protect-retail-investors
- CFTC, “Customer Advisory: AI Won’t Turn Trading Bots into Money Machines”: https://www.cftc.gov/LearnAndProtect/AdvisoriesAndArticles/AITradingBots.html
- MetaQuotes, MetaTrader 5 Help, “Expert Advisors and Custom Indicators”: https://www.metatrader5.com/en/terminal/help/algotrading/trade_robots_indicators
Risk and affiliate disclosure
Trading forex with Expert Advisors carries a real risk of losing some or all of your capital, and martingale robots can suffer rare but very large losses. The results above are historical figures from accounts we own and do not predict future performance.
Some links on this page are affiliate links. If you buy through them, Algo Trading Space may earn a commission at no extra cost to you; this never affects the data we publish or which robot we recommend.
