Hey Petko!
FTMO is very legit, one of the most respected prop firms. Hence why their challenge is notoriously difficult, they are around for the long term and won’t fund a trader with bad risk management, haha! They aren’t a broker persay, they use LMAX.
I took all 28 major currency pairs and split them into diversified groups, and then started generating strategies on each group of six at a time, since I couldn’t do more than that at once with my CPU without slowing down the reactor. I’ve been trading on most of the 28–some I couldn’t get enough strategies for. So I did trade the ones you mentioned.
The spread, swap, and commission with LMAX look better than most other brokers I have used in the past. EURUSD for example currently has a spread of 2, commission is $3, swap long is -0.91 and swap short is +0.24. I’ve entered these figures into the symbol settings for each pair that I’m generating strategies for. I don’t know why these symbol settings would be bad, but maybe this is a key to why I’m getting so few strategies, I dunno…
On the demo account, FTMO is passing along data from LMAX, who is only providing 2 weeks of data for demo accounts. There is nothing they or I can do about it from the answer I received. Maybe I could purchase it directly from LMAX, but they don’t seem to want to deal with individuals. I tried getting more historical data from LMAX via MT5 because it is listed as a demo server on a native install (not from any broker, just direct from metatrader5.com), but the data they provide there is nowhere near the same or as good as what they give as a liquidity provider to large firms like FTMO (spread, commission, etc.). So I’m still stuck downloading data that’s not identical and trying to match it up via symbol settings. If I had an account with them long enough, I could use my own captured data over a longer time period, but I need to pass the challenge to get a real account to have that, LOL! 14-day demo accounts won’t give you more data than what I’ve got.
One problem I’ve had is opening too many trades at too high a lot (0.05 or higher is TOO much!) and easily going below 5% equity. So I’ve had to stick with 0.01 lots because the stop loss on most of these strategies is quite large, and if you have 50 trades open and 2/3 of them start going in the negative, you can very easily hit your daily maximum loss. Is there a way to limit how many trades each EA opens at once? Maybe having only 5 strategies per pair and limiting myself to 10 pairs would help limit max open trades at once and risk, allowing a larger lot size. If you get 10 strategies per pair, you are back to 0.01 lot size to avoid max daily limits. The hedging really cancels out a lot of winning trades. It’s really tough to hit +10% profit in a month without ever risking more than 5% total equity in open trades at once I’ve discovered. I started using a 3rd party EA to enable a better trailing stop on all opened trades to capture positive equity and close it out faster, since I wasn’t hitting the take profit very often without dropping into negative equity a lot. I’ve tried changing the reactor to accomplish this, either with a trailing stop, or with a stop loss smaller than take profit, but wound up with even fewer strategies.
I think I need to start all over generating strategies on another demo account with another broker just to be sure symbol settings is what is preventing me from finding good strategies. I’ve wasted about 2 weeks of CPU time so far. The strategies I’ve been generating are losing more than winning, even when they look good on the last 2 weeks of LMAX data before putting them on the demo account for forward testing.