Forex robot builder software is any program that allows the trader to generate, automate and analyze trading strategies.
Today we are going to compare the two Forex robot builders that we use in the Academy – Expert Advisor Studio and Forex Strategy Builder Professional.
First, we need to mention that both Forex EA builders are designed for traders who have no experience in programming. They can be used by anyone who is interested to use Expert Advisors or the so-called Forex robots.
How to Choose a Forex Robot Builder
I continue with a quick overview of the Expert Advisor Studio, which is the Forex robot builder I am using the most at the moment for the last 2 years and something. And I see with the many reviews I get from the students and the traders that take my courses that EA Studio is very suitable for beginners as well.
Easier to learn compared to Forex Strategy Builder. So if you want to use 2 of them, the EA Studio and the FSB, I would suggest you go first with EA Studio and then go with the FSB Pro Forex robot builder. And it will be easier because personally, I did it the other way around.
It was FSB Pro that I first started with because at this time EA Studio was not yet developed and honestly, it was harder for me to start with it compared to EA Studio.
If you start from scratch, definitely EA Studio Forex robot builder will be easier for you, and the 2 software are different. I’m not going into details about the difference between the 2, but EA Studio has some unique tools that are not available in FSB and at the same time, FSB has some features that are not available in EA Studio. So when I combine them, I find the best results. But that’s personal for me.
Expert Advisor Studio, or EA Studio
EA Studio is a web-based Forex robot builder software. This makes it really easy to use. All you need is a device with an Internet connection – a desktop computer, notebook, tablet, or even a phone. EA Studio helps the trader to create, test, and analyze Forex strategies and export them as Expert Advisors.
And if you want to start with EA Studio, you can check out the free course that we have on the home page. And now I will go through it very quickly. So you’ll have an idea of how we use the Forex robot builder and you will know what to do. There are 15 days free trial as well, which I would suggest you go for because it’s absolutely free and you can export as many Expert Advisors, test them, and see how it’s working. It’s a great experience for every Algo trader.
The Generator
So the first thing we have in this Forex robot builder is the Generator.
The Generator is the smart tool behind the Forex robot builder software, which produces strategies based on historical data.
I already talked about historical data. I showed you the Forex historical data app and we have the premium data, which comes from the historical data app automatically.
It is uploaded in EA Studio automatically. So I don’t need to download it. What I do after that is I just make the data work for my broker and I will show you that in the next lecture. So after that, what I do, is I select the symbol, the period. Let’s say I wanna create strategies for EURUSD on M15.
The Balance chart in EA Studio Forex Robot Builder
And then I will go to strategy properties.
Here, we have the option to select how many lots we want to trade. Are we going to use Stop Loss or Take Profit? Are we going to set any criteria for the Generator or not and for how much time will the Forex robot builder be working? This is the working minutes. As well, we can select some preset Indicators, and then we have the acceptance criteria.
So if I uncheck those 2,
I just want to show you very quickly how the Generator works, immediately it calculates some trading strategies. The speed is really fast. And I already have a Balance chart for a nice strategy.
All of these trading strategies go into the Collection in the Forex robot builder, and from here I can choose the ones that I want to trade with.
If I click on the refresh button they will just refresh because all the time the Generator is generating strategies. Now, not all of the strategies look good. I can see what equity lines I have. These are not the strategies that I want to trade. I just wanted to show you that even if I didn’t do anything, the Generator will show me strategies.
Forex Robot Builder Acceptance Criteria & The Equity Line
But we have some criteria and this is actually the Acceptance Criteria. I didn’t use it. And in the next lecture, I will show you how I’m using it.
But in simple words, this is the place in Forex robot builder, where we can predefine, for example, how much of a minimum net profit we want or how many Count of trades we require as a minimum.
And the Generator will show us strategies only that fulfill these Acceptance Criteria. So I will not see a bunch of strategies here that don’t look good. Even at the moment, I have some decent strategies. For example, this one over here, you can see what a nice equity line it has, it has 2 entry Indicators, 1 exit.
But what I was saying is that when we use the Acceptance Criteria, we filter the strategies even before they were generated and shown in the collection.
After we have the strategies, you can do a few things. One is you can select the strategies you want to use from performance filters.
So basically, from here, I do, one more time, filtering the strategies. Let’s say that I want to see strategies that did a minimum of 2 000 USD as a profit. And just 5 of the strategies did over 2 000 USD of a profit for the period that we have. Or what I can do is I can just go through the strategies and I can select which ones I want to trade, just looking from the equity line.
Over-optimization in EA Studio Forex Robot Builder
And I have selected one of the strategies in the Forex robot builder randomly. I have 3 Entry Indicators and 1 Exit Indicator. This strategy doesn’t use Stop Loss or Take Profit because this is how I selected to run the Generator just for demonstrational purposes in this lecture. From here I have a lot of options. I can optimize the strategy, which means that I will look for better parameters. Let me just click on the start without setting anything.
And you see that I have actually a better strategy with different parameters.
Or in other words, the EA Studio Forex robot builder finds, which are the most appropriate parameters for that strategy. The equity line improved a lot. And this option is also available in MetaTrader. We have Optimizer there. It works much slower and it’s not that reliable as EA Studio.
I would go always for EA Studio if I have to do optimization and if I want to use the last parameters that it found, I will just click on this green edit button. It’s the same strategy but the Indicators have different parameters.
Now, optimizing the strategy is a little bit risky because we can over-optimize it. Or in other words, we’ll just find the best parameters for that period of time, which might not work in the future.
The Normalizer
And in the next lectures, I will talk more about that because that’s super important. Just wanted to let you know what the Optimizer is. We have Normalizer as well, which is a unique tool in EA Studio.
You cannot find it anywhere else at the moment.
Let’s click on start. I don’t know if it will be able to do it right now, but basically, it will try to remove useless Indicators or to reduce the parameters. And right now, I didn’t do any changes. I didn’t set up any different settings. And as I’ve said, I will talk more about it later. The walk forward is a little bit of more advanced tool.
I will just click on start and I will show you what’s the idea. Here we check if the strategy was over-optimized. Basically, how does it work? It divides the whole backtested periods in a few segments. It does optimization for 1 segment and then it tests the strategy for the next segment. After that, it includes the new period, does optimization, again and again, then simulates trading. This is why it’s called Walk Forward.
The robustness tools
Step by step, it checks if the strategy was over-optimized, and because I used the optimizer, it’s very likely that the strategy will be over-optimized. And I will just stop it now because as I said, it’s a more advanced topic and it requires a lot of explanations. I have a lot of free videos about it as well. Then we have the Monte Carlo, Multi Market, and Out of Sample tools, which are robustness tools.
This means that these tools are not changing the strategy like the Optimizer, Normalizer, and Walk Forward but they just check if the strategy is robust enough to perform profitably in the future. For example, this strategy that I picked randomly without any settings in the Forex robot builder, one more time is very likely to fail. I will click on START and let’s see how many tests will be validated.
Actually, it’s doing pretty good. 20 out of the 20 are validated.
So what the Monte Carlo did in this case, it’s messed a little bit the historical data, it checked with different spread, slippage. Also, it tried to break the strategy, skipping position entry, and skipping position exit. And as well, we have a few more options. And actually, I use the most the last 2 options.
The Multi Market
I will tell you why a little bit later in the course. But basically, here, the idea is that we don’t want to see many backtests to fail. It does a variety of different backtests with different parameters and different spread. And if the strategy is robust, it just doesn’t fail like what happened right now. So we can depend on that strategy. The Multi Market checks if this strategy is profitable in other markets.
So I have in the Forex robot builder, for example, BRENTCMDUSD, which obviously is not Forex. I will just switch to some currency pairs and anything. I will just click on start and I will see how the Forex robot builder works for any other market that it chooses.
Let me make something clear for the Multi Market from the beginning. If the other markets are losing or the strategy loses on the other currency pairs, this doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s a losing strategy.
Because initially, it was created for EURUSD and not for the rest. But if the strategy is profitable on 4 out of the 5 or 3 out of the 5, then this is great. Because this way, you will feel more comfortable using it when you know that it’s a strategy that would work on other currency pairs as well.
The Out of Sample monitor
And then we have the Out of Sample Monitor, which is very useful.
This is a preferable method for many of the traders to test the strategies, and it helps me to avoid Demo testing and it gives a lot of statistics. But what’s the idea of the Out of Sample? It’s a lot of information I’ve brought to you in this lecture.
If you are looking at a Forex robot builder for the first time, but just wanted to give you an idea, what are the different tools, in the next lectures I will go through those in more detail.
But Out of Sample does something very simple. It divides the whole backtested period into 2 zones. The white zone is the In Sample part and the Green Zone is the Out of Sample part.
And in this case, we have 30% Out of Sample. I can change it to 20, for example.
So if we use 20% Out of Sample, that would mean that the Generator will use these 80% to generate strategies, and then it will simulate trading for the last 20%, which will be very similar if we have placed that strategy on a Demo Account. And in this case, the Out of Sample starts from the 4th of February 2020. And until the moment today is the 20th of November.
The Reactor
This is a lot of testing that I would have wasted on a Demo Account to see if the strategy was profitable or not. It was profitable with 601 USD in this case. Basically, this is what it means. This is the Out of Sample in EA Studio Forex robot builder.
And in the next lecture, I will show you how I’m using it. It’s very useful. As well, in the next lecture, I will show you what is the Reactor, because this is the tool that made EA Studio the best software out there.
The Reactor does everything I showed to you. Absolutely automatically. I don’t need to go through all of these steps manually anymore.
It wasn’t like that before. But then they created the Reactor from Forex Software company. This is the company that has developed EA Studio. And once we had the Reactor, it was a game-changer. Everything happens automatically.
And in the next lecture, I will show you how I use it and how you can test it as well with the free trial.
Forex Strategy Builder Professional, or FSB Pro
This Forex robot builder needs to be installed on a computer. It allows the trader to build a strategy and see the results in real-time. Using Historical data from the selected broker, the trader can see how the strategy performed during the last months or years. If the result is satisfying, one can export the strategy as Expert Advisor with one click.
FSB Pro comes with a 15-days free trial as well. During this time you can analyze your own trading strategies or create new ones, and export them as Expert Advisors for algorithmic trading.
Trading Strategies Generator
Forex Strategy Builder Professional generator uses hundreds of indicators, which means that the trader can use custom indicators. There is the option to lock and link indicators.
Suitable For Manual Trading
In Forex Strategy Builder Pro you can build a trading strategy that you are using for manual trading and analyze its performance in detail.
Custom Indicators
If the user is a developer, he can use his own trading indicator in FSB Pro.
Trading Strategies Portfolio
FSB Pro helps the trader to compound strategy performance with different statistics, stagnation period, and real-time performance analysis.
Final Words About Forex Robot Builder
In conclusion, it is hard to conclude which Forex robot builder is better because they are simply different programs. But we can say that EA Studio is more suitable for beginner traders, and FSB Pro for advanced traders.
Also, if you are a fan of using strategies for the Range market, you better choose EA Studio. And if you are more a trend-follower, you can select FSB Pro. As a result, experienced traders prefer to use both programs together.
Thank you, guys, for reading.
