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@Viktor-No problem. I am enjoying this trading so much, I have no issue with sharing my experience. I keep the calculation very simple..7 out of 10 trades equals my 70% winning percentage. Even if a trade has a 70% winning percentage and then has a small negative profit, I will still use it. I just analyze each of the 10 trades to see if I can manipulate the stop loss and/or take profit to result in a better net profit. This is also when I use the optimizer in EA Studio to see if it comes up with similar results.
I maintain this process even after I go live. Once an EA loses more than 3 times out of 10 trades, I immediately pull it and replace it with a new one. I don’t want to take the chance that it will continue to lose and then perform better later. If it does, that’s nice and if I ever have to replace another EA for the same time frame and currency pair, then I can revisit it again. I’m very conservative in my trading, so risk management is very important to me. :)
@Stephen-I try to keep the rule of 3, but of course my exception is JPY and I forgot to mention absolutely USD. :)
Completely agree with you a lot of the effort put into creating profitable EAs makes a huge difference. One of my goals for next year is to start branching off into exotic Forex pairs like EUR/TRY, USD/HKD, etc.@Viktor-I took some advice from Petko and then formulated my own rules for demo. I put a lot of effort on the generation of EAs…meaning my acceptance criteria is very strict. Once this is done, I demo test with this criteria before going live:
Min 2 week trading time period
Min 10 open and closed trades
Min 70% winning percentageI have 4 live EAs in my account right now and I am demo testing 96 EAs. The 4 EAs that I have live, I keep them in demo as well just to maintain performance history.
@Viktor-I know exactly how you feel. Petko is right. I started with hardly no education, loss some money in live accounts and found the Academy with EA Studio. I’m very glad I found this software.
I also agree with Petko about keeping emotions out of trading, which I also had a hard time with when doing manual trading. With the EAs, I don’t even look at charts anymore. The only thing I do is check to see what my account balance is and to see how my demo EAs are performing. Most of my time is spent creating the EAs with EA studio, loading them on MT to use for automated trading, analyzing results, and replacing if need be. I love this about EA Studio.
Glad to have you back on board. Feel free to reach out. I’m starting to get more involved in the forums and have no issues with sharing my experience.
@Haliffa-Yes, I do exactly the way Petko says. I go to the D1 chart, press the home key for about 10 secs, then press CTRL and – keys together to shrink the bars in the chart, and then press the home key to go back to around August 2012.
I never really paid attention to the spread because I also tend to trade on pairs with low spread (10 or less), but I am thinking that I should start to pay more attention just to be on the safe side.
@Haliffa-I guess the data depends on your broker. For Forex, I’ve seen the data go back over 10 years. However, I only stick with 5 years as a cut off. Since EA Studio is only letting you use a max of 200,000 bars…then 5 years is enough bars for H1 and higher time frames. I believe D1 gives me about 3000+ bars if I go back 5 years, but rarely trade at that time frame. I’ve been sticking to M15 and H1 time frames. For M15 charts and going back to January 2013, that puts me at 146,000+ bars.
For the other assets (indicies, crypto, energy, metals), I don’t have as much data. They only go back as far as April 2018. So, it’s a bit more risky generating strategies for those and I put a lot of importance on being very specific with my filter criteria once a strategy was generated. Also, I started importing and generating strategies on live broker data. I try to keep it simple and not confuse between demo and live. I much prefer live. :)
Since you mentioned that you like trading Forex, are there any pairs that are your favorites?
@Petko-Thanks for this. I think I need to get that course to see how you do it, so I can understand better. And then I will definitely try it in demo first before going live. :)
@Stephen-I would definitely agree with Petko that you were very heavy on EUR with those strategies. It’s very similar to what Haliffa was trying to warn me about. I only trade with 3 pairs that have GBP in them. I use this as my rule when looking at currencies to trade. For every currency I trade, it is only used 3 times max. So in your case of using the EUR, I have EUR/USD, EUR/JPY, and EUR/GBP. *There is an exception to this rule and that is JPY. I have EUR/JPY, AUD/JPY, GBP/JPY, and USD/JPY. I did this because I am actually quite fond of the JPY pairs as they don’t really move as much as one would think (well according to the strategies that I generated).
For diversification and you wanting to do 10 EAs on one pair, then I would start with the major pairs (EUR/USD, USD/JPY, GBP/USD, AUD/USD, USD/CAD, USD/CHF, NZD/USD) and pick 3 to work with. Maybe split the 10 EAs up with 5 being on M15 and 5 being on H1 or whatever time frames you like to use.
I noticed that EUR/USD, GBP/USD, and AUD/USD tend to move in the same direction so take pair correlation into account as well. I noticed that USD/JPY moves opposite the afore mentioned pairs. I also noticed that USD/CAD and USD/CHF tend to move the same direction as well. Notice I said direction and not necessarily speed. Movement is in an overall perspective, but not always at the same time.
Once you get the hang of it, you may want to take a look at cross pairs as well. :) Hope this helps.
@Haliffa-You are absolutely right. I actually prefer to trade with a stop loss and take profit. When I generate the strategies, I don’t do this. I only do it when I am about to go live. I use demo to show me that the parameters are working and then when I go live I implement my normal money/risk management for my trades. *The best way I do this is by looking at the average pip movement for the asset in each trade.
The only thing I would advise to look out for on Gas, Oil, etc, is the pip movement and how much it costs. Also, double-check the minimum amount of lots needed to trade. For Gas, I will always keep it at 0.01 lots for account balance less than 10k because the cost per lot is more than Forex. For example, I have a demo trade on Gas right now. It has moved 0.4 pips, and shows a profit of 41.10USD trading a 0.01 lot. Great profit potential with this asset and minimal risk if you manage the lot size and money correctly.
I generate my strategies with the acceptance criteria set at 70% winning and 20% max drawdown. My historical data is about 5 years worth. This makes it a lot easier to have winning strategies when I start to demo.
That is awesome. I figure the more work I put into creating the EAs, the profit from them is my reward. It sounds like your’re doing great as well. Keep up the great work. Happy trading!
@Petko-Ok, that makes sense. So, I’m only going to use the optimizer with the EAs that I get from you in the courses. Got it. Otherwise, I will stick with my original process of generating new EAs, when one starts to lose. Thanks a bunch.
@Petko-Ah, I see now. I didn’t even realize about the spread for the lower timeframes. I think I will just stick with M15 and H1 time frames to be on the safe side.
@Haliffa-Yes, you’re right. I am wary of the whole Brexit thing, but I’m just going to let everything play out as it may. My 4th EA that I just went live with yesterday is GBP/JPY, so you’re right..GBP is playing a big part in my trading. But then again, this currency has been the most active during the time I have been trading.
I do have 3 more EAs that look like they should be ready to go live within the next week or so and it looks like a better mix: Natural Gas, Silver, AUD/JPY.
I test the EAs in Demo with this criteria:
Min 10 trades-Opened and closed
Min win %-70
Min trade time-2 weeks*I immediately get rid of any EAs that have more than 3 losses before it even gets to 10 trades as it already fails my criteria of a 70% winning performance.
I don’t really pay attention to the min # of pips because with a 70% winning percentage and taking profit around 50 pips on average already in my EA, I make that 100 pips easily. Also, it wouldn’t apply to the other assets I trade like the indicies, gas, silver, etc. So, I try to keep things as simple as possible to let me run through the analysis results. I use FX Blue Live to do this (Thanks Petko for letting us know about this website).
I started Demo testing in September and went live in October with those that passed the criteria. I spent a lot of time creating the strategies for all the different assets and also to replace ones that failed.
Hi Jordy! I didn’t see that you had already posted as I also posted a similar question about other people are using EAs to trade. I see that your focus is on three Forex pairs and are just using the top ten strategies for each of those pairs on M15 only. Now, I see you are going to expand to M30 and H1 charts. That’s gonna be 90 EAs trading on three pairs! You have great results.
I am building strategies on 24 different pairs with two time frames, but they are not just Forex. I’m also including indicies, cryptocurrency, metals, and energy. If things don’t work for me in this way, I may switch my logic and focus on maybe three pairs like you and then trade on multiple time frames. I currently have three Fprex pairs trading live right now. Thanks for sharing.
Thanks so much, Petko! If it wasn’t for you, I would have never had this kind of progress. Much appreciated to you and the developers of EA Studio.
Ok, that makes me feel better. I believe that I go through a pretty rigorous process in generating the strategy, filtering to the one that I would like to demo, demo test, and then go live. To generate 96 EAs, it took me almost 2 months, but I feel the time is worth it.
I’m not really sure I even want to do optimization now. I feel like if the EA passes the acceptance criteria in generation, the demo testing criteria to go live, and then maintains the same success rate in live trading, there is no need to optimize. If it starts to perform below the expectation, then I would just replace it with a new EA created from my process.
So, I guess I’m trying to figure out maybe when should optimization be utilized and if so, is it worth it?
Hi there! Yes, this is with 0.1 lot traded. I took Petko’s advice and will trade with 0.1 lots until I have more than 10 EAs running. At that point, I will reduce them to 0.01 lots if it makes good risk management sense (such as depending on whether or not I am 10k account balance).
Yes, the three EAs are Forex. This is only because I started with Forex pairs when I first started creating EAs through EA studio. It took me about 1.5 months to create all the EAs for all the different assets. Depending on stagnation and when I started them in demo (max 30% stagnation and placed in demo either October or November), most of them should be completing the demo testing period by the end of December. So, I estimate I will be around 10+ EAs to start in January.
My three EAs that are live and generating profit are: GBP/USD M15, EUR/GBP M15, and AUD/USD H1. The GBP/USD, I went live around end of October, AUD/USD around beginning of November, and EUR/GBP about a week ago.