About Etako Inc.

The company behind ETA-CODE, the research it came out of, and what it was built to give back.

The company

ETA-CODE is made and sold by Etako Inc., a corporation incorporated in Ontario, Canada, corporation number 1001784796.

Etako Inc. is a software company. It builds long-term solutions to problems in different parts of society — financial among them. ETA-CODE is among the more recent of those products, and it is the one this site is about.

Why ETA-CODE exists

Trading is not a sideshow. It runs between companies, between banks and between countries, across physical goods and services alike, and it is one of the ways the world prices what it has.

But the same market is not the same arena for everyone standing in it. A bank carrying a position against it has a balance sheet, a mandate and a committee; the move is a bad quarter, and the desk opens again on Monday. A retail trader has the account, the mortgage, and nobody to tell. The identical move is a line item for one and the end of the other. And it has rarely stopped at the account.

None of this is new. The instruments changed, the screens changed, the leverage got easier to reach — and in forty years nothing has touched the part that actually breaks. Every generation of retail traders discovers it personally, and pays the full price for the lesson.

Which raises the question of what that part is, because it is not the part people reach for. Most traders do not lose because the strategy was wrong. They lose after it was right.

A good run arrives. Confidence arrives with it. The size goes up once — only once, and only because this one looks obvious. The market turns. The position is held past the point the rule allowed, because closing it now would make the loss real. And the decision to close finally comes at the bottom, which is the one moment it was never going to pay.

Four decisions, and not one of them is a strategy. All four are taken in the minutes when a person is least able to take them, which is why knowing better has never been enough.

So the question was never how to predict gold. It was whether those four decisions could be taken out of human hands altogether — and what it would look like if they were. On the record this site publishes: the rules took eighteen losing trades in a row and went on to take the next one. They stood out of the market for fifty-six days because the conditions they wait for were not there, and did not get restless. They took every small loss at the moment the rule said so, and not once widened a stop to give a position room.

Nobody does that. Not for want of knowing — every trader knows — but because it has to be done at exactly the moment it is hardest, and then again, and then again, for years.

That is what ETA-CODE is for. It is not a cleverer way to read gold. It is the same rules, applied the same way, whether anyone is watching or not.

The study that came before the software

Nothing was written until the ground had been walked. The work began as a study of what already existed — the published approaches to trading gold, the automated ones in particular: what each of them was really doing, where its strength genuinely lay, and what it cost the account to hold it.

The strengths were real, and worth saying plainly. Many of these approaches are sharp inside the conditions they were made for. Some are elegant. A few are formidable for a season.

The weakness was almost always the same one, and it only shows up over time. An approach performs in the window it was built in, and then the window changes. Held over years rather than months, most of what looks impressive in a short record turns unprofitable — not because the idea was stupid, but because it was never measured against a market that stopped behaving the way it had when the idea was formed.

The same failures kept recurring, and they are worth naming:

Recovery arithmetic. Adding to a losing position to average the price down. The curve is beautiful until the one move that does not come back, and then there is no account left to argue with.
Fitting. Parameters tuned until a chosen stretch of history looks superb. That is not a discovery about the market; it is a description of that stretch.
Constant exposure. Systems that must be in the market, treating inactivity as a fault rather than as a decision.
Nothing underneath. Risk controlled trade by trade, with no limit on what the whole account can lose before something stops it.
A short record. Evidence drawn from a period that contained no real crisis, presented as though it had survived one.

Put together, those findings pointed somewhere specific. The hard part of this problem is not finding an entry. Entries are the part everybody works on. The hard part is surviving long exposure — staying intact across years in which the market is under no obligation to resemble the years before it.

How it was built

Gold is not a company. It has no earnings, no product, no management to replace. It moves on fear, on rates, on what the rest of the world is doing with its money — which is why it can sit flat for a long while and then reprice violently, and why an approach borrowed from equities tends to break on it.

So ETA-CODE was not built around a clever reading of an indicator. It was built around the behaviour of this market and the behaviour of the person in front of it — the first because it can be studied, the second because it can be removed from the loop altogether.

Markets follow rules nobody can predict reliably. What happens in front of the screen follows rules too, and those are manageable — and the part that decides whether a trader ends up profitable is usually the part they are least able to control in the moment. The size taken in a confident week. The stop widened to give a loss room. The position closed at the bottom because holding it had become unbearable. That is the part the software was built to take.

Everything after that followed from treating it as an engineering problem rather than a prediction problem:

The rules were written first, then tested — not tuned against a window until the window flattered them.
They were measured against the whole record, 2004 to 2026: 266 months of gold, holding 2008, the four-year fall after 2011, and 2022. Across 2,031 trades of that run the deepest the account ever stood below its deposit was 26.7%.
A protective stop goes on with every position as it opens, and the system does not add to a loser to average down.
A floor sits under the whole account, not just under each trade — and it rises as the account does, and never comes back down.
Standing aside is a decision, not a fault. The system is willing to hold out for weeks at a time, and the product counts every opportunity it examined so you can see it doing so.

Every figure published on this site is read from the strategy-test reports by a script. None of them is typed in by hand, here or in the documents. That is the only reason any of them can be checked — and it is why the losing runs and the worst year sit on these pages next to the gains.

The build a customer receives is re-run as its own test and compared, deal by deal, against the developer build. That check exists because an earlier release went out with one of the market filters compiled out, and nothing but that comparison caught it.

What it was built to give back

There is a version of trading that eats a life. The chart is open at breakfast. The phone is face-up at dinner. A holiday is spent checking a position from a hotel balcony, and the people who came on the holiday notice.

That is not discipline. It is captivity with a login.

ETA-CODE was built the other way round — to take the screen away from the trader. It is deliberately slow: roughly one trade every five days, long stretches with none at all, positions held for weeks. It needs a terminal that stays on, and that is all it needs. You choose the agent, you paste your key once, and after that the dashboard is there for when you are curious rather than because it is waiting for you.

What that buys is hours. Evenings that belong to your children. A weekend that is actually a weekend. A trip where the phone stays in the bag — because the rules are being applied the same way whether you are watching or not, and that was always the point.

Trading should not enslave anyone. Done properly, it should do the opposite: hand back the time it has been taking.

We will not dress that up. Freedom from the screen is not freedom from risk. The account stays yours, the money stays yours, and the possibility of loss does not go away because the software is patient. What goes away is the need to be present for every decision — and for most people, that was the expensive part.

Who ETA-CODE is built for

It is not for everyone, and the people it suits least are the ones the figures attract most. So it is worth being plain about the fit before anyone pays for it.

It is built for someone who will leave it alone. About one trade every five days, positions held for weeks, and long stretches — the longest measured was fifty-six days — where it does nothing at all, because the conditions it waits for are not there. If a quiet fortnight feels like something has broken, this will be an uncomfortable thing to own. The product counts every opportunity it examined, precisely so that a quiet month can be checked rather than worried about.

It is built for someone thinking in years. It is deliberately slow, and it compounds. Judged over a few weeks it will look like very little is happening, because very little is — that is the design, not a fault in it.

It is built for an account of almost any size. It reads which account type it is running on and sizes to it, so a small account and a substantial one are both ordinary cases rather than special ones. The one thing it does need is a machine that stays on; most people run it on a VPS, because a terminal that is only open in the evenings will miss things.

It is not built for anyone who wants to trade alongside it on the same account. ETA-CODE does not encourage that and is not designed around it. Hand-placed trades change the exposure the system believes it is carrying, and the consequences — including the loss of the account — are the trader's own responsibility, whether they arise from the manual trades or from how the software behaves around them. If you want to trade by hand, use a separate account.

And it is not built for money you need soon, or money you cannot afford to lose. It is a tool you operate, the account is yours, and it can lose. The Risk Disclosure sets out the whole of that before anyone buys, and it is the honest version rather than the comfortable one.

What this company does not do

It does not manage money. There are no managed accounts, no pooled funds, and no trading carried out on anyone's behalf.
It never takes custody of your funds. Your account stays with your own broker, in your name, under your control. Etako Inc. cannot deposit to it, withdraw from it, or trade it.
It does not sell trading signals and does not run a copy-trading service.
It does not give financial advice. Nothing on this site or in the documents is a recommendation to trade gold or anything else.
It does not promise a return. Every figure published is a measurement of what these rules did over data that has already happened. The Risk Disclosure sets out the whole of that before anyone buys.
It does not pay for referrals. There is no affiliate scheme and no commission for introducing anyone.

ETA-CODE is a tool you operate. The money, the account and the decision to use it remain yours.

Getting in touch

A person answers, usually within 24 hours, every day. There is no ticket system and no chatbot standing in front of it.