One example is a strategy which is running since September 1 last year on a major FX pair and has made a profit of 233k with a maximum equity dd of 9.8k (based on consecutive losses) while trading with a constant position size of 10 lots. There were 468 trades, only one position at a time (no pyramiding, no martingaling, no hedging) with a very tight stop and unlimited profit target. The overall profit factor has been 1.84.

I would include the equity curve of the strategy but unfortunately I cannot add any attachments here

I have similar strategies running on nearly every FX major pair and on XAUUSD each of them exploiting the micro structure of the market. There are no parameters specific for the pairs and no optimization as the principle behind is universal. I also don't use MT4 as it is too slow (trade execution by an average MT4 server is ca. 500 ms) and it would eat some of the profits. Instead I use FIX API and a direct link to the liquidity providers to trade my strategies. While the strategies can be traded on MT4 it is absolutely critical not to use the MT4 data feed. Not only the data arrives with a delay but you get just a sampling and never the raw tick by tick data from the liquidity providers. In this way you can never see certain details which are very relevant for the price direction. Sometimes the price action within 1 ms second can be indicative for the beginning of a very significant move but a typical retail broker would shade this as a service for you

The understanding of the underlying technology, the protocols, algorithms and the way liquidity providers and brokers operate, the limitations at each level is the pre-requisite for success because it gives you a real advantage.

Here is an example: let's say you work with a broker who offers you MT4 as a trading platform. This broker will be typically connected to a liquidity provider and this connection will be probably with a latency time of 10ms (some MT4 brokers have even much worse latency). Then the processing in the MT4 server takes another 10ms and there is a latency from you to the MT4 server of ca. 100ms. So you get a price feed with a delay of 120 ms if the broker doesn't manipulate the feed. If he does than you have to add some time on top. Now your program makes a decision within 5 ms and you send an order to the broker which takes another 100ms. The MT4 server execution takes another 700-1500 ms (yes MT4 execution is terribly slow) so that your overall latency when trading via MT4 is between 1 and 2 sec!

Now my question: what opportunity do you see here to exploit this setup for your advantage and to take some cash out of the MT4 broker before they close your account And believe me, you don't need advanced math for doing that