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Hold on, lowered minimum stop loss and take profit from 10 to 5?? Set your ranges for minimum stop loss and take profit from 10 – 200.
Also for acceptance criteria just start with a simple minimum 300 trades and minimum profit factor of 1.2 for the complete sample. If using OOS then set the IS and OSS min profit factor to 1.1.
Also this seems to be a generation issue so don’t worry about running Monte Carlo or anything in the reactor. Just use the validator after you have a good collection to do this.
let me know how you go?
Interesting. All I can think of is that for M15 it’s not managing to find strategies because it is simply more difficult for this data, perhaps it’s just more noisy on this timeframe over the last 5 years (which it will be) and harder to predict.
I understand it’s a little unintuitive but it doesn’t mean that there is a mistake really. Worth asking questions but if after checks everything is as it should be then we can only assume it’s just harder to find strategies passing the acceptance criteria on this timeframe.
On the one hand it takes longer to generate strategies for M15 as there are 4x as many bars but then on the other I would have expected that it would have been easier to pass the minimum trade acceptance criteria but it must be struggling with the others.
What other acceptance criteria do you have set? I would leave the minimum count of trades at 300 but relax the other acceptance criteria a little bit so that you get some strategies in the collection and then filter from there.
Much better after an overnight generation to have a couple of hundred strategies in the collection that you can trim down using the performance filter than just have a handful in the collection.
Hi Alan, yes I would have expected it to be easier to pass the minimum trade count acceptance criteria on M15.
First are you absolutely sure of these three things:
1. The EA studio settings are identical except for the timeframe
2. This is for the same symbol
3. That you have all the bars for the full 5 year days range for M15 and there are no gaps (use the check in the data statistics to confirm this)
Once you have confirmed these I will be able to help more.
Hey Alan, not sure what you mean by accurate but I’m assuming you mean reliable and robust.
To be able to have any kind of faith in the strategy it’s important that it has been backtest over a significant period and has made a significant number of trades in that period.
Personally I use about 5 years data for both M15 and H1 and set the minimum trades to 300. Obviously this will be 4x more bars for M15 so will take longer to generate strategies, but it is also easier to pass the minimum 300 trade criteria for M15.
Hope that answers your question? Using less is fine as is using more, that’s just what I use ;-)
Also to get this amount of data use the Premium data or historical data app
Hey Matthew, you are welcome re my suggestions. Glad they helped :-)
Requiring 300 trades over 2 years data will definitely be much easier to pass for M15 than H1 so that makes sense. If you want to get strategies for H1 also then I would be increasing the number of bars used in backtesting to be closer to what worked well on M15.
Not sure re NZDUSD, maybe try initially relaxing the acceptance criteria to get 100 or so eas into the collection and then investigate in the collection what seems to be the criteria that it is struggling the most to pass and make a decision about how best to proceed from there.
Well done on the great results so far. Good to see :-)
Hi Alan,
I just checked the link and you are correct that is not the right files. I have let Petko know so it will be resolved soon :-). I’m sure Petko will notify you here as soon as the link has been fixed.
Hi James,
How much data are you using and what is your acceptance criteria? This sounds like it could be a combination of not much data and overly strict acceptance criteria.
Have you used EA studio on other pairs successfully?
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? :-)