Herakles Index EA

It is built for DJ30, US500 and USTEC — the Dow, the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq. Those three are what the Labours were developed against, so start there: attach Herakles to one of them, or switch on Multi-Instrument Mode to trade the whole Instruments list (those three by default) from one chart. The catch is that index symbol names are not standardised: what one broker calls DJ30 another calls US30, WS30 or DJIA. Open Market Watch, find the exact names your broker uses, and put those in the Instruments list. If a name does not match, Herakles refuses to start and the Experts tab names the symbol — and suggests the suffix, if your broker uses one.

No. Every Labour is a complete strategy in its own right, with its own magic number and its own positions, so you can run all twelve, a handful, or a single one. All twelve are enabled by default because that is the point of the EA — twelve unrelated ideas sharing one account means no single one has to be right for the portfolio to work. Turning one off never touches another Labour's open trades.

No. There is no martingale, no grid and no averaging down anywhere in it — a losing position is never reinforced. Position sizing comes from your risk setting and the stop distance, and every trade carries a stop from the moment it opens. The way Herakles spreads risk is by holding many independent positions from unrelated strategies, not by stacking more size onto a trade that is already wrong.

The stop is measured in multiples of each instrument's average daily range rather than in points. A points-based stop is meaningless across a portfolio where one index trades near 44,000 and another near 8,000 — the same number would be a scratch on one and a catastrophe on the other. Sizing the stop by daily range means it means the same thing on every instrument, and it widens or tightens by itself as volatility changes.

No. Herakles is long-only: every Labour buys, and none of them ever opens a short. Several Labours can each hold their own long position on the same index at the same time, each with its own magic number and its own stop, without interfering with one another.

It is recommended rather than required. The Labours work off higher-timeframe signals, so Herakles is not latency-sensitive the way a scalper like Ares is — a few hundred milliseconds makes no difference to it. What a VPS does buy you is uptime: if your home PC sleeps or your connection drops when a signal fires, you miss that trade entirely. If you are running it on real money, a VPS is worth the small monthly cost.

Not recommended — Herakles is not built for prop-firm accounts, which is why the E8 Markets route on the main page is offered for Forex Flipper and Chronos Forex, not for Herakles. There is no news filter and no master switch to close everything at a profit target, so a firm's daily-loss and maximum-drawdown limits would be entirely yours to manage. If prop trading is your main goal, ORB Revolution is the tool that was actually built for it.

Fusion Markets or Ultima Markets — or BlackBull Markets or Vantage Markets from the alternative brokers list. Herakles is not built for prop-firm accounts, so the E8 Markets route does not apply to it. The thing to check before you open the account is the index range: spreads, the exact symbols offered and the contract sizes all differ between brokers, so confirm that DJ30, US500 and USTEC — or your broker's equivalents — are actually quoted on the account type you are opening. The broker comparison on the main page covers the rest.

Because an independently verified forward test is worth more than a historical simulation, and that is the direction the whole site is moving in. The verified demo account shown above is Herakles' track record, and it updates automatically. Run your own backtest too: the settings are all documented above and you should always test an EA yourself before going live.