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@SharapovaSisi-No problem at all. Thank you for contributing in the forum. It’s nice to get different perspectives on trading from everyone.
The 20% max drawdown is from the account as a whole. Right now, it got up to 56% and that was because I went outside of trading plan and started to get greedy. So, I had to rein myself in and get back to basics. It’s gonna take a while for it to get back down to 20% max drawdown for the total account, but I know it will get there and I am not going to deviate from the trading plan again. Even in automated trading, a trader can get greedy. If only just manipulating the trading lot size on an EA, which is exactly what I did. But thank goodness, I caught myself. :)@SharapovaSisi-Hi there! I only have a license for EA Studio and have been working with it since September 2018. I honestly would not be trading anymore if it wasn’t for this software. I spent about a month generating EAs and just learning how to analyze the data.
Depending on the assets that are available from your broker, I say that it is always a good thing to diversify your trading portfolio. My broker offers forex, cryptocurrency, global indices, and commodity asset pairs to trade. So it gives me a good amount of assets to create a diversified portfolio. But even if you only have forex to work with, it can still be a great diversified portfolio. Honestly, I looked at each category of assets, did trading research about it online (like how it moves, any news regarding it, etc. just to learn more about it) and then whatever caught my interest, I just started creating EAs for it. My favorites are GBP/USD, AUD/JPY, EUR/GBP, Silver, Brent Oil, Natural Gas, DAX30, FTSE100, and USTech 100.
In regards to risk and drawdowns, you have to be disciplined to not indulge over your trading risk management plan. When I am creating strategies, I have specific criteria that I use for every single one. I then demo for a certain amount of time, and then go live. Once live, the EA cannot go below my performance threshold. So for instance, I cannot tolerate no more than a 20% max drawdown in my live account. I could if I wanted to, but this is not my trading risk/money management plan. When creating strategies, I use 0.1 lot size with a 1k USD account as a starting balance and 20% max drawdown. Once I have those strategies created, and they pass demo, I turn them on live using 0.01-0.04 as the trading lot size. This way, my EA is set to trade at 0.01 and I created it with a 0.1 trading lot size with max 20% drawdown, then my live drawdown max is 2% off a 1k USD account. And this actually gets even less with a higher balance account, minimizing the amount of overall loss. :)
I’m a very conservative trader because I use my trading profit to supplement my household finance. I don’t like losing money, so I have put things in place to avoid this or to have a loss that is deemed acceptable.
Hope this helps with my thought process on things. Feel free to ask me anything. I don’t mind sharing. *I actually redid my trading portfolio in January, so I kind of started all over, but I had already made back my initial investment, so I’m happy.
@Andi-Yes, that’s absolutely right.
I know that I have been chatting with some people and they think that I am creating more work for myself by doing all this analyzing and stuff, but I told them that just because we do automated trading doesn’t mean that there isn’t still work involved. I check on the performance of EAs at the end of each trading session, that way I can catch any that are not performing to my criteria. I actually like the FIFO rule as it forces me to keep up with the analyzing and stuff.
I also have a trading plan where at every 2k USD the lot size for my Forex EAs double in size. When my account balance is at 3k USD, the lot sizes will change to 0.02-0.08 and I will probably continue with this money management rule until I hit 10k. Of course, I do all this is demo before I apply any trading plan/money management risk in live account. And I am only doing this on Forex because the risk/pip in Forex is a lower value when compared to my trading of the commodities.I probably won’t change the lot size of the commodities until maybe every 5k USD, but we’ll see.
@Andi-I first look at win/loss % for the last 10 trades, then I look to see how many pips did each trade move, and how much profit/loss occurred for each trade. Highest win%, highest pips, and highest profit/lowest loss =0.04 and then I take the next best and give it 0.03 and so forth. Of course, this all occurs for each asset pair. So as I am trading 12 different assets right now, there are only 12 EAs that have the 0.04 lot size (1 for each asset pair). Hope this helps explain my thought process better.
@Petko-I’m thankful that this conversation came up before and I was able to learn how to get around this rule.
@Donald-You’re very welcome!
@Desita-That would be great! I found that the EAs that perform better are not the ones that generate the most profit when trading at 0.01 lots. So these are the ones that I set at 0.04 lots. :) Of course this is all just based on a starting account balance of 1k USD. It’ll change once my live account hits 10k USD.
@Andi-I I think that this is a great question. Personally, I like to stick with EAs that work for a longer period of time. As long as it stays profitable and maintains my criteria of acceptable performance, I keep it until it starts to do bad. I kind of rearranged my trading portfolio, so I had to recreate a bunch of EAs for my assets and different timeframes. With this, I am only running EA Studio to produce enough EAs for me to trade live and then have some backups running in demo. I honestly don’t want to keep running the software every single day unless I have to. I haven’t really used the EAs that Petko gives us except for the ones in cryptocurrency and that is because I am having a hard time generating them myself with the criteria that I deem acceptable. I’m thinking that I need to start pulling some of Petko’s EAs into my portfolio…
@Donald-Hi there! I’m a US trader. In order for me to get around the FIFO rule, I had to change my lot size and the number of EAs that I am trading on an asset pair. For instance, I only trade 4 EAs for each asset pair. My EAs are (2) H1 and (2) M15. The lot size ranges from 0.01-0.04, meaning that I am always trading 0.1 lots on an asset pair. I have my best performing EA with the highest lot size of 0.04. This avoids having to wait for the first trade to close before the next on can be done as it is a different lot size. I’ve had no issues doing it this way.
Also, this didn’t change the way I generated strategies..just how to manage the risk when trading.
Hope this helps.
@everyone-Ok, I just just checked and the EAs are closing on Friday like I created them. I just had one left over from the beginning before I started doing this that is open. Phew! :) Thanks for everyone’s input.
@everyone-Thanks for all the feedback. I’m going to watch my trades closely and if I see that after this Friday, they are still open…I’m gonna maybe send in a support ticket to see what I could possibly be doing wrong. :)
@edu-Hi there! I’ve created EAs for both of these. I did nothing different. Just export the data and generate strategies. The only thing I had to double check was the minimum lot size to trade from my broker, which for any of the indices is 1 standard lot. Your broker might be different. I did nothing with the spread as I just left it as default. I generated some pretty good strategies, but am only testing on demo as I don’t have a live account value at the level I want it to be in order to start trading the indices.
@Ossaio-Thanks for responding. Could you please explain a bit more about the Day closing and Week closing? I believe that this is somewhere in the coding of the EA that I would need to update in order to have my positions automatically close?
@Ossaso abd Desita-I originally thought that was what the coding of the trading session meant when I created the EAs to have the positions automatically close, but I could have been mistaken as this is not occurring.
@Maria-Hi there! I know what you are talking about. I did have to change the acceptance criteria in order to generate strategies, but then I would use the performance filers in the collection with the same acceptance criteria I would have normally use to get the strategies I want. That was the only around that issue that I found.
@ivelina-You’re quite welcome. Just keep practicing with the software and you’ll get it. I have only been using EA Studio for about 6 months and I love it. But I am still learning just as well and with the awesome updates that come through, it makes it a continual learning process but rewarding none the same. :)