Hi Matthew,
Profits do not come easy and Petko’s advice has always been to learn and practice using demos before using live. I made the same mistake early on but to a much smaller degree than 10k fortunately.
You must practice on demos until you are profitable.
Regardless of how skillfully a collection of robots has been put together if you just throw them on a live account you will very likely lose money.
As to the recommended time etc, have you run your own tests?
Countless ways to do this but you need to get creative, for example. IC markets allows up to 20 demo accounts, you could open 1 to put on all the robots you have then come up with 10 or so variations of moving robots and keep track of the results in a spreadsheet and see what is performing best as a filter criteria maybe?
For example
10 trades with pf>1.2, 5 trades with pf>1.2 and win/loss > 0.6 and so on.
Play around and learn, but definitely don’t go live until ready or you will lose money for sure regardless of the quality of the robots you start with!