Managing Live EAs

[Paul S]

Hello all,

 

I need some advise on managing the live EAs

Do you guys just keep running your live ea until it is below 1.2 pf and then remove it from your live account, until its profitable again?

Do you look for the performance over the last couple days/weeks?Do you look for the profit factor over the period over the past week/month or over all the data?
Do you just keep EAs running on your demo for a long time to see when its profitable again? or do you use the validator for that?
Any input is much appreciated

 

Kind Regards,

 

Paul

[Samuel Jackson]

Hi Paul,

Using the validator OR fxblue is fine for managing the EAs but once they are on demo I would recommend using fxblue personally.

As to your question about how regularly to change the EAs. I can only say what personally make the most sense to me at the minute and that would be to look at BOTH its performance over this life of its time on demo and a shorter period such as week and make your decision based on that. IIan in one of his courses uses a month and a week which is also sensible.

It would also depend on the timeframe as I would be looking to change M15 Ea’s more regularly that H4 EA’s for example.

Hope that helps.

PS Of course I hope you mean a mock live account (i.e second demo) rather than a live account right?

[Alan Northam]

I am new to using EA’s myself but I can share my plan with you.  I get 50 updated EA’s from the “Top 10 EURUSD Expert Advisors: Top EA Forex Trading” course I took every month.  I have put these 50 EA’s in a demo MT4 terminal.  I then did the strategy tester on each one of them using all the data history I have (two months worth) which I believe to be sufficient because I am only interested in the recent performance of these EA’s.  I then recorded the results of EA’s that had PF greater than 1.2 and number of trades greater than 2 and graph showing an upward trend.  I then sorted the list by Greatest profit to the least profit.  I then selected the EA I want to use by the greatest profit.  It seems to me that I want to pick the EA’s with the greatest profit over the last two months regardless of the number of trades or the PF.  I may change this opinion over time but for now this is my plan.  Since I am running 10 MT4 terminals I then select the top 10 EA’s making the most profit.

Now how do I plan on managing these 10 EA’s.  Every weekend I will run the strategy tester on the 50 EA’s in my demo account.  I will then update my spreadsheet.  Next I will run the strategy tester on the 10 EA’s in my MT4 live accounts and review the graphs.  As long as these graphs continue to trend upward and making good profit I will leave them.  The EA’s whose graphs are starting to point downward I will replace with EA’s from my spreadsheet.  I will update my plan as needed as I continue to gain experience trading EA’s.

I hope I have made my plan clear enough, if now ask questions.

 

 

[Paul S]

Hey thanks for the replies guys,

 

I am trying to automate the managing part with excel, so far that part went well. The performance however did not.
I export my trades with an ea I made and import it to excel. then I can calculate profit factor on different timeframes (weekly, or monthly or total).
Then i export a list with the magic numbers I would like to be traded to my mock/live account.
Biggest problem I think I have is that the ea will perform well and gets on my list. But then it trades badly, and drops off my list. So I mostly got the bad trades, while I was trying to filter the cherries. Also I noticed I was just dropping alot of ea in the demo account, maybe it is too much and I should aim for quality over quantity.

 

I tried updating my excel every 5 minutes/hourly/daily and weekly, but most times it gets in negative once it goes live.

So maybe I will try if I can see if an ea is “trending” like you are trying, but I think I have to go back to the drawing board for that.
Also I will focus more on the course ea’s I think.

 

 

[Alan Northam]

So far my portfolio of EA’s is doing good but I only have 6 days of trade results so far.  I will be showing the results of my EA Trading Portfolio consisting of 10 EA’s this next weekend on the following forum: How to Select EA’s to Use?

[Petko Aleksandrov]

Thanks for sharing your experience, guys. That is super useful for the beginner traders!

[jezen]

Hi Guys, i am having the same problem as Paul describes. For a few months I have tried many things: using Petko’s EAs from courses, generating my own EAs following the courses, and generating my own portfolios using my own methods. I have also used many different method to manage these EAs and transfer to Live (mock using demo account). I have tried selecting top X performing from demo and moving into live, using the validator to analyse performance of last 6 months, directly placing portfolio and removing poor performing ones.

The problem is that I cant generate profits on these mock live accounts no matter what methods I use. For about 2 months from January to end of February I could consistently generate profits but since then nothing seems to work.

I wonder if others are also struggling more recently to generate profits compared to before February?

Any suggestions on methods are are working for some?

Thanks!

[Samuel Jackson]

Hi Jezen,

It’s definitely been a tough spell for trading. What assets have you been trading?

Including some additional EAs in your incubation demo accounts that not only worked well over your full backtesting period but also also performed best over the most recent few months could be good idea.

I have been putting a higher emphasis on recent trading months performance in EA generation which worked well last month. Ie a shorter OOS and better OOS performance than I usually use.

[jezen]

Hi Samuel, thanks for your response.

I have been mainly trading the most liquid forex pairs, i.e EURUSD, GBPUSD, EURGBP, EURJPY, GBPJPY, USDJPY. Focusing primarily on M15 and H1 timeframes as that is what is most recommended in both the forum and by Petko (However I have also tested M5, M1, and H4 timeframes with worse results).

When it comes to generating strategies I have tested varying the OOS to accommodate for multiple scenarios where the start of the OOS period is both well before, after, and roughly around the date where I noticed profits started disappearing (towards the end of February).  Neither of these worked better that any other (at least nothing significant). I guess the next thing I will try will be to generate strategies with higher OOS criteria as you mentioned, and only select those that worked best from the period since February.

Would you recommend any particular assets or timeframes that you have found success with since February?

[Samuel Jackson]

I actually found the JPY pairs worked pretty well. It would be interesting to hear from Petko but to my understanding he has found gold to be pretty stable also.

Sounds sensible what you are doing with pairs and timeframes so hopefully you have some better success shifting a little weighting to recent performance as discussed.  Again I will be interested to hear from Petko on his thoughts soon 🙂

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