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Hi Alan,
The Top 5 forex strategies course is great but focuses on 5 strategies rather than using Ea Studio.
Also Top 10 Eurusd is an older course before the reactor was included in Ea studio, so while still lots to learn in it, it wont be as useful in helping you drive EA studio best as one of the newer courses.
I would recommend taking the “top 12 forex strategies that I trade live course”. It is one of the newer courses and much more comprehensive in using EA studio than the two you currently have as I am sure you will see once you take a look at the syllabus.
Lots of great courses but this one will definitely help you pick up EA studio faster.
I’m that case I would definitely suggest taking at least one course while you are trialing EA studio.
The syllabus is shown in each one so I would recommend you take a look and pick what one feels best. It will definitely help you get an understanding much faster and most will even have benefits in understanding how to manage your EAs even if you don’t purchase EA studio.
I can think of a few I would recommend initially that not only help with EA studio but have a strong emphasis on how to manage the EAs one demo and live account, so let me know if you would like me to point them out.
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 :-)
Hey Alan,
Have you taken any of Petkos courses? I think form the sounds of things taking a couple could really help speed up your review of EA studio.
As for your question. The generator will generate strategies and then backtest them, if they pass the acceptance criteria then they go into the collection.
The same happens in the reactors but to make it to the collection a strategy must also pass the criteria set in Your selected robustness settings such as Monte Carlo.
I you additionally select to optimize the strategy in the reactor then it will be optimized prior to robustness testing.
In choosing one over the other you may choose the generator if you want to be more manual in how you optimize and test your EAs, or you could save the generated collection and try optimismzing/robustness testing the same collection in different ways perhaps.
Generally I would recommend just I’m using the Reactor with Monte Carlo though, good to have options though. Early days there was only the generator but it’s still there even though the reactor has been added.
Hey Alan,
Its will just give more range for EA studio to work with and find strategies. If you are getting plenty strategies for certain symbols then you could reduce the range a bit for those symbols and vice versa for the ones not getting many strategies.
Start with some general settings and tweak a few things for each pair. You could for example increase these ranges as suggested if not getting many strategies and if still at 200 and getting no strategies you can then start reducing the strictness of your acceptance criteria in stages, for example reducing your 300 trade requirement OOS to 200 trades and see the effect.
Take note of what works well for each symbol so you don’t have to repeat the process as it may take a week or two.
Hey Matthew, yeah now would not be a good time for EAs on crypto in my opinion. I tend to prefer to trade indexes differently and only in the long direction.
I mostly stick to diversifying within forex though.
What timeframes are you using? 300 trades in 24 months is quite a lot so I can understand why it’s hard to get lots of strategies passing this with a good profit factor.
Also btw your stop loss and take profit ranges can make it harder to find strategies if too tight so you could try increasing that. What are you currently using, if 10-100 then I suggest the following.
Open as many reactors as you can on your computer (my rule of thumb is a reactor for each processor core) each with the same settings on a different pair using your preferred timeframe (I am assuming M15?), make sure stop loss and take profit limit is set to 20-200. Run for 24hrs and then see what pairs have more strategies that meets your acceptance criteria.
You could do this several times with a few different batches of symbols and you can take note of the pairs that are working best for you.
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.
Additional, my guess is that there is a minimum lot size issue as this is for BTC. Check your experts tab to see if there are any errors.
It’s likely that if you increase the lot size to 1 for the BTC Ea that it will start trading.
Also I would suggest that you see how things look when you run it through the backtester as this could likely highlight the issue ( and also show how often you should expect it to trade in a week)
Hope that helps you get to the bottom of things? :-)
Hi Wawa,
Why is it that you think the BTC EA is trading XAU??
It looks to me that the BTC Ea just hasn’t made any trades yet which is highly likely on an H1 EA that has only been on demo for a couple of days.
IF you closed all your trades and chart and then ONLY had a single Chart open that was BTC with the BTC EA then I would believe it’s trading a different currency.
I am however very sure that is not what is happening.
Also it doesn’t matter what the EA says (ie wether it is for BTC or XAUUSD) it is the chart it is attached to that will be traded.
hi Alan,
Yes the EAs that he through the money Carlo are ascended to the collection. If 69 have passed the Monte Carlo but only 50 then likely you have automatically remove correlated EAs set on in the collection and some are being removed. If you click on the collection tab and scroll down then on the left had side there will be some stats to tell you why some have been removed from collection.
it could be that your collection size is set to 50 so check that but I expect it’s to do with correlated strategies being removed.
let me know if not and maybe send some screenshots
Hi Alan,
During generation all strategies that pass the acceptance criteria end up in the collection. If you click to collection tab you can view all the information about the strategy and then export is as an mt4 or mt5 expert advisor.
Or you can add several to the portfolio and see a combined equity curve and then export a portfolio expert advisor.
the same applies if you are using the validator instead of generator/reactor.
hope that helps?
Hey Tanya,
Good question re timeframe. It would depend on number of trades really, if your H1 is making 3 trades in a week on average then it’s fine but like you say if it’s only making 1 or two then two weeks would more appropriate for H1.
I tend to stay away from M5 and M1 personally, the lower timeframe the more of an impact noise is gonna have which is totally unpredictable so I stick to M15 and H1 mostly (H4 and Daily also).
For how often to add new EAs it would depend on how many on your demo account are still trading well generally (ie have a profit factor of 1.1 over the complete time on demo would be good ones to keep). In do tend to just put a complete new set of EAs up once a month but it’s not the only way.
Do you have FSB also? It is great but you don’t need it. In my opinion it’s best when you have a particular trading strategy that you are trying to create. Both EA studio and FSB pro have their strengths and weaknesses but I wouldn’t be overly concerned about rushing to learn FSB pro unless you want to do something that you can’t in EA studio.
Hey Tanya,
Sounds like a good plan. I wouldn’t be too rigid about the 12 EAs. I’d say aim for 10-20 EAs and stick with 0.1 lots size on your 10k account and you will get a feel for how much your balance will change over the course of a month.
It of course depends on the EAs you select as one EA may typically trade more often than another for example.
More important of course is to be moving your balance in the right direction but you will want to also get a feel for the risk you are taking on your account every month.
For example, if you have a trading plan for a month then you should be able to feel pretty sure that even if you have a really bad trading month that your balance is very unlikely to drop below a certain threshold.
As an example of you had 10 EAs trading then for each one you could get the average number of trades a month, win loss ratio and typical size of losing and winning trade. Then you could assume that the win loss ratio was halved to simulate a bad month and calculate what the loss would be for the month and scale your lot size accordingly.
I’m not saying that this is a good way as I just came up with it on the spot as a quick example but it would give you something tangible to estimate as a start and you can improve your calculation as you gain experience.
In a nutshell the point I am trying to make is just that you should have a reason for the lot size you are trading that is as much about the risk you are willing to take as it is about the profit target you are aiming for. But always aim to keep things as simple as they can be :-)
Hey Matt,
Well that’s definitely looking great then. The prop challenges are definitely tricky to get through but it sounds like you are getting close with your stable results.
It’s definitely the daily drawdown that is the trickiest to pass while making profit target as you are finding.
How many EAs are you trading? Diversifying further could help you achieve a better reward to risk ratio.
Hey Tanya,
Yeah good recap.
For selecting the EAs we are doing a couple of things when we trade them on demo. First is we are actually applying a final filter that removes strategies that MAY have been overfit and also then trying to catch the EAs in their profitable phase.
I think it’s important to wait the full month personally before moving anything onto mock demo with over 10 trades and good performance, also I like a week as a shorter filter too.
For the short filter I am happy with a few trades and a profit factor of 1.1. For the longer filter I like to see more trades and a profit factor of 1.1 along with a drawdown value that aligns with what was shown in the backtest.
A longer filter would also be smart in my opinion (say 3 months) but it’s a balance between managing all the accounts also so I like 1 month and 1 week for simplicity.
I would suggest that you think of a few things you would like to try and then have three mock demo accounts and compare the results over a few months to see what works best (remember and record everything in a spreadsheet).
Of course you have to find the balance with time and effort that works for you. I don’t have a lot of free time so I adjust my systems to suit.