Moving EAs vs Generating EAs every month

[Tanya Jay]

Hello everyone!

What’s the best way to maintain and optimize your EAs monthly?

I’ve been practicing moving EAs to mock live, however, the results were always bad (negative return) compared to the demo account with 100’s of EAs running altogether.

I’m wondering if anyone maintains your EAs by generating a new set of EAs every month regardless of the result of the past month?

I’m not sure what I did wrong, but my ‘moving-winner-port’ has never been profitable.

Thoughts?

 

Briefly on my port:
– Trade on M15, H1, and H4
– GBPJPY, AUDCAD, EURGBP, USDCHF

Tanya

[Petko Aleksandrov]

Hey Tanya,

Glad to hear from you.

May I ask a few questions before giving you some tips?

1. Do you use the same broker for both accounts, and which is the broker?

2. What rules do you follow to move EAs from the Demo to the mock live, and what rules you follow to remove the EAs from the mock live?

3. How did you choose these pairs GBJPY, AUDCAD, EURGBP, USDCHF?

Cheers,

Petko A.

PS I do not mind the EURGBP but all the rest. 🙂

[Tanya Jay]

Hey Petko,

Nice to e-meet you and thanks for your reply.

Below is my answer. Please feel free to give me some tips and your honest feedback  🙂

1. Do you use the same broker for both accounts, and which is the broker?
– Yes, I do use the same broker for both accounts (as Sam already mentioned). It’s IC markets.

2. What rules do you follow to move EAs from the Demo to the mock live, and what rules you follow to remove the EAs from the mock live?
– Rules to move EAs from demo to the mock live: I look back 2 weeks AND 1 month data, PF 1.2, trade number 5 or more. Rules to remove, whichever EAs that don’t fall into the criteria I just mentioned. I check and move EAs every 2 weeks.

3. How did you choose these pairs GBJPY, AUDCAD, EURGBP, USDCHF?
– Sam advised me to choose uncorrelated pairs and I came up with these four.

All the best,
Tanya

[Samuel Jackson]

Hey Tanya and Petko,

I can add a few points:

Tanya uses IC markets for both demo and mock live account and I know that she validates the strategies using the IC markets broker data.

Although I didn’t select these pairs I advised Tanya to do what I do which is to select 4 pairs to trade together that are as uncorrelated as possible. They look good to me? Also the mix of timeframes M15, H1 and H4 also works well for minimizing correlation on the same symbol.

I’ve got two of those pairs in my own portfolio at the moment and it’s been trading really well 🙂

Can you confirm the above is correct Tanya 🙂

As to the poor results Tanya:

You have at least a month of trading on the demo and at least a few trades when deciding how to move EAs right?

How many EAs are you putting on your mock live at a time?

Also you could try a few different mock live accounts at the same time and trial a few different selection methods?

But to answer the original question Tanya (at last :-):

My advice would be to maintain a pool of collections and then check them every 3 months or so using the validator for the most recent three months of data, then remove the ones that don’t perform well over the last three months and keep doing this ongoingly.

Over time you will build a higher quality pool.

The higher quality your pool of strategies the less need to continually create more.

Also keep things simple when moving the EAs, just a good profit factor and more than 5 trades for example over the last month.

Keep the demo running as long as possible and keep replacing the strategies that are performing poorly. This is why I actually prefer to work with single EAs rather than portfolio EAs as it makes it cleaner to just remove an EA that’s performing poorly and then replace it with a new one.

Keep practicing as you are Tanya, things will improve with practice, it sounds simple enough but it does take a while to get the knack of things 🙂

 

[Samuel Jackson]

Of course nothing to stop you trying another pair combination in tandem Tanya. If pairs are working better for you then try combining them as it is likely that your pool of EAs for these pairs are higher quality (which can be partly lucky sometimes as it is very possible to run the reactor with exact same settings and pick top 10 the exact same what and one with far more overoptimised poorer quality EAs than the other.

This is one of the main reasons it’s important to test them appropriately out of sample, starting with using demo accounts (and patience) and progressing to using EA studio without the demo as your experience grows.

[Tanya Jay]

Hey Sam,

It’s been awhile! Hope you’re doing well 🙂

Your answer always WOW-ed me. I don’t know how you store all these info in your brain haha. Also, I appreciate your prior answer to Petko.

Q: You have at least a month of trading on the demo and at least a few trades when deciding how to move EAs right?
A: About 1-1.5 months I believe. I need to see at least 5-6 trades before I decide to move them.

Q: How many EAs are you putting on your mock live at a time?
A: The last time there were only 6 EAs that matched the winning criteria

Q: Also you could try a few different mock live accounts at the same time and trial a few different selection methods?
A: GREAT idea! I will start doing so

My advice would be to maintain a pool of collections and then check them every 3 months or so using the validator for the most recent three months of data, then remove the ones that don’t perform well over the last three months and keep doing this ongoingly.
– Let me rephrase it and please let me know if I understand correctly; every 3 months, I will validate the EAs using Validator and remove the ones that underperformed. Then I generate new collections using reactors to replace the underperforming ones and to add more into the collection? Because the market is changing all the time, it’s possible to have the same kind of pool over time?

Very best,
Tanya

[Samuel Jackson]

Hey Tanya,

Great to see you are moving forward, and glad you appreciate my help and your kind words 😉

So my first point would be that it seems you switch the EAs every 2 weeks? This is fine but 2 weeks and 4 weeks together as selection is pretty similar. I would suggest as one of your filter tests you try just a simple filter of moving the EAs that have been profitable over the whole life on you demo account with over 5 trades (say 1.1 pf) and then as the life of your incubator account extends you could add an additional filter for the most recent month also.

Let’s say now you have a collection of 100 EAs in your pool, in three months you validate and only 50 of them have traded as profitable (or even just broken even) over the last 3 months. Move those 50 to a second tier pool for example that only has strategies that have performed suitably over three months on demo in real-time.

Over time you will build a pool of EAs that is higher quality, you could even repeat the exercise on your tier 2 pool after 6 months say and move all the ones passing that to a tier 3 pool.

Hope that makes sense? It’s just a suggestion of how you could build a higher quality pool of robots over time, you of course need a combination of good robots and sensible filter criteria to make profits.

While you are practicing and learning if you do this as a side then over a year you could make a really nice quality pool of strategies for yourself.

[Samuel Jackson]

Also to reinforce that point regarding symbols Tanya, you can defiantely add another different 4 or so symbols and then see what tends to perform best for you, then combine the 4 best ones at the mock live stage?

Just because you have lots of symbols on your incubator demo account doesn’t mean you need to trade them all on your mock live account.

[Tanya Jay]

Hi Sam,

I understand about short-term and long-term filter. 2 weeks and 1 month is, like you said, very similar. As the time passing by, I should be able to do 2 weeks and 3 months. It’s just that right now my demo account is 1.5 months old.

 

About building the pools over time, it sounds good to me. I don’t quite understand it just yet until I actually put my hands on them as the time goes.

 

I think as of now I will create more EAs on different pairs. And I will check them again every three months. This is probably the best I can do at the moment, unless you have something else you recommend me to do while waiting for the time goes by so I can use short term filter and long-term filter to move EAs to mock live account?

 

I just don’t like sitting and doing nothing for 3 months while waiting to practice moving EAs.

 

Thanks!

Tanya

[Samuel Jackson]

Hi Tanya,

Yes that sounds like a smart way forward, get some more strategies generated for some additional pairs and get them up on demo.

You can also practice tracking using EA studio for selection against your demo accounts. If you are confident that your EA studio validation is matching your demo results (which it will if set up properly), then you can practice using your pool to trade straight to your mock live account.

I don’t recommend rushing this without practicing demo first but it should be worked towards at your own pace.

How many things you can work on depends on how much time you have really. Just make sure you keep track of what you are doing and don’t do so much that you don’t know what is working well for you and what isn’t.

For reference I have a couple of big engineering projects on at the moment that are eating most of my time so have probably only managed to spend a few hours on managing my trading systems over the last month. I’d spend all day everyday working on systems and testing new things if I could, but I modify what I am doing depending on the chaos going on around me :-/

The month before I was working 14hr days straight (9hrs job and then 5hrs trading work) just so I could work on some trading things on the side though. Burnt me out a little though haha

The path you are able to take is very time dependent really, so if you feel you have plenty of time to put in some extra work then you could definitely speed up your progression 😉

Definitely have a brainstorming session and come up with some ideas to try if you have the time to put into it, there’s always things to learn test/improve/think about. Good to have a mix of active and passive things to work on, by passive I just mean sometimes things can be achieved just by waiting for time to pass while your demo accounts run.

100% agree though, I can’t sit and do nothing either 🙂

[Samuel Jackson]

I have suggestion for you Tanya 🙂

For your demo account that you have 6 weeks results Already do the following:

Make sure you have all the strategies on that account in a folder of collections (with exactly the same number of strategies), then ongoingly from now have one mock account that you use FXBlue to move EAs according to your selection criteria weekly and then on a second mock account do the same but use the validator in Ea studio to apply the exact same criteria and compare the results and EAs.

This will be a good way to practice using the validator only 🙂

[Samuel Jackson]

Hey Tanya,

How many strategies are you running on your demo account at the moment? How many of those EAs have made more than 5 trades and have a profit factor greater than 1?

Also even though its just an incubation account what is the balance of this account since starting. Is it in profit or loss generally?

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