Hi guys,
Well done on your selection of software and community btw. It took me a while to find EA studio and this community and I strongly feel it is the best software out there and the best place to learn it.
So in a nutshell you are using a modified method of Petkos Professional Course using a a self generated pool of EAs?
I’ll give my thoughts on some of your questions and definitely look forward to hearing from Petko also. There is actually so much information in your above post it almost opens up too many questions. I’ll take a look tomorrow and add a few extra points but for now I’ll just stick to answering a few below.
3 – How can you avoid that a strategy in LIVE goes directly into a loss phase.
There is always going to be a risk of this happening. However its significance depends on your trading rhythm (as you put it). For example, say you are trading an EA for one month that typically has shown in backtesting to have waves lasting about a week but generally trending up. If you are trading this EA for a month then starting on a loss is not so much of a problem, however if for example you EA has shown to have waves lasting a month or more then that could be a problem.
You are going to be trading 36 EAs so make sure as a final check to have a look at the typical cycles in the last 6 months and favor ones that have shorter stagnations and drawdown periods to lower the risk. You can take other measures such as taking a look at what factors might typically lead to the reversal of a drawdown but I’d say starting on drawdown or not can just come down to luck sometimes but it is not how the month starts that is important or skillful but how it finishes.
4 -When the trend changes, our strategies are also adjusted. Or do we stick to a 1 month rhythm?
Don’t interfere with your EA’s based on emotion. You should decide on a rhythm and a plan and stick to that. Backtesting a system based on a 1 month cycle of changing EA’s is a good timeframe and once you have decided on a good system you need to stick to the plan and keep emotion out of it. Always on demo of course until you are consistently profitable.
5 – How often do you add new strategies to the pool? And how do you avoid duplicate strategies in the pool itself.
Don’t worry about duplicate strategies in the pool as when you run the validator they will be filtered out. This can be reduced by decreasing the correlation coefficient though.
New approaches:
1 We have chosen to reach the 20% target. we have chosen 3 strategies instead of 2. The risk is still within limits. How many strategies per time unit and asset do you use? (See table below)
This sounds fine and is only a small tweak to the system in my opinion. Just lower the lot size traded as you increase the number of strategies. Is your calculated risk simply a sum of the drawdowns given by EA Studio? Over what period was this risk and profit shown in the table calculated (OOS, IS, COMPLETE?). For any of these taking these values seems very optimistic to me and looks like you have simply taken an average for the drawdown risk? For example if EA studio has calculated the OOS max drawdowns to be 2% for 10 EAs on different pairs then I would be expecting a risk of at least half of those experiencing a drawdown at the same time which would be 10% but it looks like you are just taking an average and assuming a risk of 2% for the portfolio of 10 EAs?
2 We are currently testing with 1 strategy, with 7 weeks instead of 4 weeks, on the grounds that we think the performance is more stable if we choose a wider time period for filtering. We tested this and found that the sweet spot is somewhere between 6 – 8 weeks. What are your experiences with rebalancing the portfolio, what intervals do you have? (See table below)
This seems a little bit narrow in terms of testing and I think you need to increase your sample size significantly before deciding that this is the sweet spot, its simply the sweet spot for this particular strategy over the trading period you have chosen. its highly likely if you repeat the exercise for a few different strategies a different sweet spot will appear.
One last thing is a big apology if I seem over critical in my thoughts and super to the point. I actually think you’s are getting off to a GREAT start and am very interested in seeing how you guys progress :-). Its just late here and I am tired but I wanted to reply. (Also I know Petko is very busy as the site is going through some big updates at the moment and so I expect he wont be as quick to respond as normal right now).
Keep us posted with your progress :-)