FTMO Robot: Suggestions and Ideas

[Petko Aleksandrov]

Hey traders,

Many of you have been trading the FTMO robot since I created the very first version. Based on your feedback, emails, replaies in the Forum I greatly improved it! Thank you for that!

So in this Forum Topic, I would be happy to hear more suggestions and ideas.

So far, what I have collected from e-mails and replies in the Forum is as follows:

• Take Profit for the Account (close all trades and stop trading if the challenge target is reached)
• Use on different currency pairs
• Set files for the lot size of the different accounts

Looking forward to your ideas!

[Brian Watson]

is there a way add automatic    Trailing Stop to each trade after the trade is in profit

[Nicholas Grobler]

+1 On this, I wanted to ask for this exactly. Some of the trades in V5 was nicely in profit, I was using AUDUSD, they did not hit TP and reversed to close in negative. So a trailing stop would be awesome.

[Petko Aleksandrov]

That is a good idea! I will check the possibilities and if that will bring better or worse results.

[0xRowie]

Hi Petko,

I have an idea, instead of using lot sizes, would it be possible to change it so you have the following options:
— Risk Mode: Percent or Lot Size

Percent: Based on the account size, automatically calculate the position so it will use X% of the account’s equity (This would allow compounding)
Lot Size: The setting we have now to manually set the specific lot size.

Kind regards

[Alan Northam]

EAs usually work best when they are updated once every month or two.    It is easy to adjust the lot size at these times.

[Petko Aleksandrov]

Also, if you use % and not lots, it’s hard to compare a few EAs in the account. And this is what we do – we trade many EAs and we trade them with the same lot so we can see which ones are the top performers.

[0xBitpool]

Once we get funded with FTMO, we’re not allowed to keep the trades opened overnight.

I imagine this is the reason why we have the “Entry time” settings in the EA

I have 2 questions:

1) Should we change these settings based on FTMO timezone? (in case they use different timezones depending on your region for example)

2) I’m not sure I understand correctly “keep the trades overnight”. I understand we have to close them before the night. Are these settings covering this case? Or is it just for the entry time but not the exit?

[0xBitpool]

Here is the link to FTMO FAQ for this: https://ftmo.com/en/faq/do-i-have-to-close-my-positions-overnight/

[aaronpriest]

This would only apply to weekends for Forex pairs because overnight rollover is minutes and not 2hrs, however for indices it might be nightly, I’m not sure. I use the swing account with FTMO for just this reason so I don’t have to worry about closing for news or weekends.

[0xBitpool]

Yes I was thinking of trying the challenge for a swing account for the extra safety. I must admit not looking for the news is a big plus.

A 1:30 leverage should be fine but if the robot is able to address the overnight / weekend stuff, I’d be happy to keep an eye on the important news to get access to a 1:100 leverage

 

This raises another question: does the calculation of the min position changes if the leverage is 1:30? As it’s less risky, one would maybe be tempted to multiply the lot size by 3 😏

[Dygon Linux]

Please help me to have the best setup for the 80000€ challenge and the 10000€. I want to have all Ea that works in the challenges.Thank you very much!!

[Alan Northam]

Hi Dygon,

For the 80000 euro challenge set the EA properties as follows. This will limit risk to 1%.

Amount for a new lot = 2.4
Maximum position amount = 2.4
Amount to add on addition = 0.0
Amount to close on reduction = 0.0

For the 10000 euro challenge set the EA properties as follows. This will limit risk to 1%.

Amount for a new lot = 0.3
Maximum position amount = 0.3
Amount to add on addition = 0.0
Amount to close on reduction = 0.0

To determine which EAs are working the best in the current trading environment add all EAs to a demo account and watch them for one to two weeks. Then pick the EAs performing the best and add to your FTMO challenge.

[dusktrader]

Hello, just a wishlist item… in a future update to this bot, can you offer an option to base the risk on % of equity? That way over time it will take advantage of compounding in the account.

So, for example, I’d like to be able to enter 1% as the equity risk, and the bot would calculate this dynamic for each trade.

Thank you for considering!

[dusktrader]

Hello, can you please give your thoughts on trading through holidays and/or month of December?  I noticed one of Petko’s videos was demonstrating a bot in Dec 2022 I think.

Have you by chance been able to backtest this through holiday/December months?

I’ve been advised that manual trading is a bad idea in December, but I’m curious your thoughts. Also, maybe this doesn’t apply to bots in general.

Thanks

[dusktrader]

Ahh! I see Petko already answered this question. Just watched this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCNWanYW9Do

Spoiler: he doesn’t risk real money during December for manual or bot trading (at least per this video)

[Alan Northam]

Petko was testing a new EA and it happened to be December when the new EA was created so he tested it during December.  All newly created EAs should always be tested using a demo account.  This is why he used a demo account during December.  It was not about not risking real money during December it was about testing a new EA using a demo account before deciding to move the EA to a live account.

Alan,

[dusktrader]

Thanks Alan. Are you saying that it is “okay” to pursue bot trading in December as well?

[Arik Shahar]

Hi,
I’m about to start a 100K challenge now
My question is can I use multiple profitable FTMO robots in the same account. I had 3 forex pairs with nice profits and I’m considering whether to trade with the three robots or with one of them each time.

Thanks.

Eric

[Ilan Vardy]

Hey Eric,

 

Yes, you can. You can use as many as you’re comfortable using, based on the criteria who select (profitable trades, profit factor, etc.). Just make sure you adjust the entry lots and risk settings to match the account size and number of EAs, so you don’t risk too much.

Cheers,

Ilan

[Brian Pelton]

I haven’t purchased the FTMO Bot yet but how about this approach?

Start off with all 8. Lower the lots accordingly. Divide 1% by 8.

Then monitor the performance. After you have a pair that has losses after 5 trades remove it.

Now let’s say you remove 2. Now adjust your lots to accommodate those removals.

 

This will let you stay low risk but instead of just using the top performers you slowly remove the losers just like what

is taught in the courses but on a smaller scale instead. Thoughts? Has anyone tried this?

[Alan Northam]

Hi Brian,

Good to see you are thinging about risk management. This is a good low risk approach. Good idea!  Keep thinking about ways to manage your account.  Good to see you are thinking individually instead of just following others advise.  This is the way to learn and to become a successful trader.

Alan,

[Luce]

I have an Deposit of 10k on an demo account and the balance is currently at 10.148,13

That should be a gain of 1,48%. But MyFxBook shows a gain of 0,41%:

does somebody now why?

[Alan Northam]

Go to Metatrader Account History below the chart and make sure you are showing all history.

Alan,

[Luce]

Its already set to show all history,

But even if it would not be like that, in MyFXBook it should still diplay everything.

[Carlos Benavides]

I suggest that you keep the 8 bots running inhouse and share the details for my fxbook with us so we can check for the top 3 profitable for the last 5 days I got a VPS for 15usd per month and the resources are already full with just running the test bot on 8 charts I don’t think it can handle another mt5 account to trade the top 3…. This will really help us a lot to cut costs on a VPS. Ram is already at 90% and CPU usage at 60% to 80%

[Petko Aleksandrov]

With the new Version 5 we have included set files that risk exactly 1% from the Account size.

However, I guess you request is to use % instead of Lots, which is something we have been considering.

We will also leave that topic so nay other ideas how to improve the FTMO Robot will be taken into consideration!

[Carlos Benavides]

I would like to request to add 3 or more pairs so we always have something to choose from specially on slow months like this.

[Tanyeem gazi]

hey petko can you put an entry delay feature for more easy uniqueness of the robot

[Sammy Trader]

First you buy a $25 per month VPS to test EAs on a Demo account. After a month, whatever is the 1st Top EA performed, stick to it while testing others on a demo account as things will change again after Holidays when market gets more volatile.

[Hiu Kin Yeung]

My account is down 7% on a 100K challenge, I got $93700

Now I’m planning to switch to using the FTMO bot, want to have it run on low risk ,let it grind back to $97500 , then i wanna scale it up

Is there any setting I can twerk ?

Would the bot counter any problem while i start it off with just $93700 ?

[Alan Northam]

This is exactly why demo testing is important. You can follow the guidelines for demo testing from the following link:

How To Trade the FTMO V5.1 Robots

The link shows how to trade the FTMO 5.1 robots but it applies to all FTMO robots as well.

To change the account risk from 1% to 0.5% (low risk) all you need to do is to cut the lot size in half.

Alan,

[Abhishek Chib]

Why asking for new feature. Live example : USDCAD was in profit and small New reverse the market. If we have Tailing SL or Slab wise TP then we will in profit. See screen shot.

[Robert Forbes]

Would it be possible to expand the range of trading accounts, or to allow us to put in a custom amount that automatically works out the setting?
For example, FXIFY is offering substantial discounts for challenges, and they have a $15000 account, and up to $400000. Also, Surgetrader has a $250000 account. It would be great to get settings for these account sizes.

Thanks!

 

[Alan Northam]

Hi Robert,

This is a feature request.  Please contact support@eatradingacademy.com

Alan,

 

[heroking82]

hello.

i would like to turn off a FTMO robot instead of removing it from charts…

is it possible to do the slash (//) technique with FTMO robots?

if so which line. cheers

[Alan Northam]

Hi heroking82,

Go to the Expert Advisor properties box and uncheck the following:

 

Alan,

[heroking82]

legend. cheers

[Robby Mesenberg]

Hey there!

as we got the backtest Feature, is it clever to Trade them on funded Accounts?

Does anyone have experience on that?

[Alan Northam]

Hi Robby,

The FTMO app does the backtest so traders do not have to spend time backtesting the Expert Advisors. I take the top 1 to top 3 Expert Advisors from the FTMO app and apply them to an FTMO Challenge.

Alan,

[Robby Mesenberg]

Thanks for your answer alan. I meant trading them on funded. Not Challenge. Do you have experience with that?

[Alan Northam]

Hi Robby,

Yes you can use the FTMO robots from the FTMO app on a funded account.  The only difference is that the robot will automatically close the robot when the account reaches 10% profit.  To keep this from happening you can turn this feature off in the robots properties dialog box.  The other thing is you don’t want the robot to drawdown very much so you really need to protect the account from hitting the max daily loss limit and the max account loss limit.  So I would suggest tightening these up as well.  I would also suggest not risking more than 0.5% of account balance until after you have made 1 or 2% profit.  Again this is to protect the account from drawing down.  All these changes can be made in the robots properties dialog box.  Since you have gone through the process of passing the challenge and the verification stages you do not want to loss your account once it is funded.  So slow and easy to start until you get some profit, then you can increase the risk.

Alan,

[Gilles Ruelens]

Alan

 

The top 1 -> top 3 is it from the weekly, daily, monthly?

 

thx in advance

[Alan Northam]

Hi Gilles,

I use the weekly time period to select the top 3.  I did this at the beginning of the week.  Right now my account is up about 1.6%.

Alan,

[Trader 27]

Here’s a feedback and improvement suggestion after running ftmo robot on live funded account. During New York Close, brokers tends to widen the spread, yes entry protection is in place for the EA, however, an opened trade that’s still running will be stopped out prematurely by the broker. Hence is there a way to improve the robot to prevent such losses.

Thanks in advance.

[MUSTAFA SAMEH]

Hello
I have a suggestion regarding the filter for the previous period, whether a day, a week, or a month
Is it possible to add a date from to to so that we can, for example, know the profits and losses for two weeks, not just one week?

[MUSTAFA SAMEH]

Hello
I have a suggestion regarding the filter for the previous period, whether a day, a week, or a month
Is it possible to add a date from to to so that we can, for example, know the profits and losses for two weeks, not just one week?

[vinnysvinyl]

Yes! I second this. A month is a little too long, a week a bit too short. Being able to manually select a range would allow us to hone in on the Goldilocks zone ; )

[Patrick Verlee]

Hi There,

Starting out here. I was wondering if you also have setfiles for EURO SWING accounts. That would be great for us, European traders unless there’s a reason for only using USD accounts.

Let me know. Thanks

Patrick

[Alan Northam]

Hi Patrick,

The same setfiles will work for both USD and the EURO. However, with the new FTMO app you do not get a setfile as the downloaded robots will have the correct settings.

Alan,

[Konstantinos Borsis]

Do we need to allow for the indicators to show on screen for the EA to take trades or this is not affecting trading?

I have added 3 top performers from the app for the last 2 days have not opened any trades yet. Please advise.

[Konstantinos Borsis]

Hello everyone. 2 questions :

1. do we “mess” at all with the entry protections or leave them all to zero?

2. Could we add a trailing (indicator calculated or fixed points) for longer trades to have the EA monitor any significant profits rally so it can protect some profits in case things start to go the other way?

Cheers 🙂

[Alan Northam]

Hi Konstantino,

Answer 1:  If you are using the Expert Advisor to trade with a Prop Firm then I would highly recommend setting up protections to keep from the possibility of losing your account.  However, if you are using the Expert Advisors with a demo or live account with your forex broker then the decision of using protection is up to you.

Answer 2:  After years of creating Expert Advisors Petko has learned there is no advantage of using trailing stops, in fact, it can actually cause the trader to lose more trades.  Here is the reason:  In the majority of trades the market will draw down by a percent or two before trading in the positive direction.  With trailing stops this could cause your trade to stop out with a loss instead of going on and becoming profitable.

Alan,

[Konstantinos Borsis]

Hey Alan, quick one if you know: is the entry time schedule and the zero entry protections part of the optimisation as well? So we could either adjust only lot size and maybe spread max or we can leave it as is since it has been optimised in the Robot app?

[Konstantinos Borsis]

Thank you Alan. Regarding entry settings, I was wondering why by default these are all zero although if you set them up you would get safer trades but also much less activity. The bot is set not own many trades at the same time anyway, and the schedule and news and equity protection filters that are on by default can offer significant protection I believe. This is why max spread, max open positions and max lot can be both good and bad. Also, I usually cut the lot size suggested by 40-50% to make things even safer. So was wondering maybe the entry protection is a bit overkill if the activity of the bot would be further restricted as from monthly to daily sets the amount of trades fall to 1 trade (month-week-day) although usually the DD is much lower than Y1 or Y5 which offer more possibilities of trading due to larger history data with also better correlated balance-equity graphs.

So I would usually select 1-3 top performers tbh either M or Y1 and avoid W or D most of the times and use them only for confirmation and verification for my selection of the top performers. I would also avoid putting more than 3 bots on same account at the same time and avoid increasing lots at least until I hit a minimum of 3 consecutive wins which then go and scale a bit higher.

Now regarding trailing I do agree that usually will eat to your profits but at least it won’t run you to SL or bigger losses if set correctly. In general manual setting of the SL when the trade is going good is better as well as maybe adding the MT trail after your position is at least 1/3 in profits run.

[rasa]

I may have found a bug in the prop robot app: when selecting a different amount for trading capital one would assume that the oder of the robots do not change while in the same timeframe … that is true for all amounts but the $10K: the best robot stays the same but from then on the order is different from all the other amounts … please look into that … thank you!

[Alan Northam]

Hi rasa,

This is not a bug but how the prop firm robot app works.  As you change the account size the profit in “dollars” changes and this then can change the order of the robots from most profitable to least profitable.

Alan,

[rasa]

thank you … it seems to be the cause of rounding …

[Konstantinos Borsis]

Hello Guys. Do you adjust entry time or entry protections at all? I am trying to research and monitor spread behaviour and best entry time settings for XAUUSD, EURUSD and EURAUD. Any thoughts ideas much appreciated 🙂

[Konstantinos Borsis]

Hello guys,

trying to get some insight on these:

1. I understand that optimisation in the app is providing best trade settings per TF and historical data chosen per account size. So besides, lot size do I need to adjust entry protections (spread, max positions max lot) or for example the entry time/schedule? What would you suggest please?

2. I check for 1-3 top performers looking for smoother graph line and lower DD version and use only these. Any suggestions here as well please?

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