Hey Simon,
Glad to hear back from you.
How normally I proceed with the minimum count of trades:
1. When I generate EAs for the first time for asset and time frame, I start from higher to lower number. For example, I place 1000, and if I see there are no generated strategies, I lower it to 900, and I keep doing this until I see the first strategies showing.
2. To the assets and the time frames that I generate new strategies every month, I add another 20 because there is new Historical data added.
Regarding the risk-diversification you can so many things:
- trading different assets
- different time frames
- different acceptance when you run the reactor
- different robustness tests
- portfolio Experts and regular Experts
- different methods to filter the strategies in the Demo account
- different approach to move the EAs from demo to live and the other way around
and these are just the ones that come to mind at the moment.
Every different approach that you take in the complete process is risk-diversification.