Why is my trading bot losing money?

Start by establishing whether this is a drawdown or a failure, because the responses are opposite. A system with a 40% win rate produces losing runs constantly — ten consecutive losses is ordinary rather than alarming — and switching it off during a normal drawdown converts a temporary loss into a permanent one. Compare the current decline against the maximum drawdown of the tested period before concluding anything.

If the decline is outside anything the testing produced, the most likely explanation is overfitting. A strategy tuned until its backtest looked good describes that period and nothing else, and live trading is the first honest test it has faced.

The second most likely is costs. Spread and commission are paid on every trade and are frequently a double-digit share of a short target on gold. A strategy that is marginally profitable gross can be reliably negative net, and the profit calculator shows the size of that gap for a specific trade.

The two less obvious causes

A regime change means the strategy is fine and the conditions are not. Trend systems bleed in ranges and mean-reversion systems bleed in trends, and neither is broken — this is why regime gating exists, and why we ship with the choppy regime disabled entirely rather than pretending we have a strategy for it.

Position sizing is the quietest cause. If the broker minimum lot has been rounding your size up, your real risk per trade is higher than configured and the account is drawing down faster than the strategy warrants. Compute the actual dollar risk of a recent trade by hand and compare it against the setting.