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Hey Alan,
Your thoughts are correct as far as I am concerned. Drawdowns are inevitable no matter how good the account. If the principles however are solid and you have faith in your system along with setting sensible levels of risk then riding them out is needed when they occur.
It takes time and practice to develop this faith and experience and therefore scaling up slowly from demo, to small live to incremental increases in trading capital is a sensible path.
I also wouldn’t be confused with drawdowns occurring. All portfolios have stagnation periods.
Its up to you to decide wether it is a stagnation period or a poor system which comes with practice and time (experience)
Hey Alex, to add to what Petko has said.
How much you trade depends on your risk tolerance you want to make sure that first you are at no risk of a margin call so should calculate what your max margin would be if you had an open trade on all your EAs and adjust accordingly (use half your margin at most).
Also you should have rough idea of what your range of profit/drawdown would be per month or so, best to make sure that also this limits your drawdown to your risk tolerance. 5% a month works for my sanity
Hi Alan,
Take a look at the long/ short balance curves for your strategies in EA studio.
You may find that they are strategies that have performed best taking short trades but not so well for long trades?
Also you could run a backtest in MT4 with visual mode turned on to see clearly where on that chart you are making your trades for each EA in order to get a better understanding of how things have been trading.
Good job on comparing your EA studio results with FXBlue.
Doesn’t need to be complicated regarding combining assets Alan, 3 or 4 different assets is plenty.
Try EURUSD, EURJPY and USDJPY for example or EURUSD, EURGBP and GBPUSD
Regarding the different Assets suggestion this is just my opinion.
Trading a portfolio of a single asset can work provided correlation between strategies is low, although I would be mixing timeframes personally.
Also certain reactor settings will work better for different assets so I expect that’s why Petko has courses focusing on a single Asset.
Additionally you could combine portfolios from different assets. I personally just trade single EAs but would definitely be happy with converting Ea Ea to a portfolio Ea that combines several strategies for a single asset, time is the only reason I don’t do it at the moment/I don’t feel it’s necessary even if it would be good.
Hey Alan, that all seems sensible enough, it sounds like you are running the normalizer one the validator? I would remove that personally as it’s already been run in the reactor. Monte Carlo a second time is fine
Also in the validator I would remove the OOS = 20% as it should be in sample.
Further to this I would suggest using an mt4 demo account to validate that your selection of EAs using EA studio matches your selection using FXBlue to make sure you have things set up properly.
Hey Alan, well that’s the great thing. You can do the free trial as many times as you want but can only do one at a time.
I don’t manual trade at all anymore, I just traded a portfolio of 10 EAs on various symbols
Hey Petko,
Basically the FTMO challenge is that you can pay an entry free (depended on size of account but is about 150 dollars for a 10k account).
The to pass the challenge you must meet the profit target in 30 days while respecting the drawdown rules.
IF you pass the challenge then there is a verification phase that basically gives you twice the length of time to achieve the same target again.
At this point you are awarded the 10 account to trade on and will be able to withdraw real profits each month (20% of the profits go to FTMO though)
But they have a free trial that allows traders to try half the challenge period for free and provide the same metrix so it’s a really good free way of testing yourself :-).
I used to try the free trial loads and failed almost everytime when I was getting started, but now I just take it occasionally for a bit of fun and do pretty well most of the time :-)
It is certainly challenging to pass such targets while avoiding drawdowns for the full challenge and verification period though so gotta know what you are doing for sure. I prefer to just trade my own money without the rules although they are very good rules to follow but at least a small breach doesn’t result in losing an account.
Hey Alan,
I’m not seeing a minimum count of trades in your acceptance criteria. Also selected best 10 according to what criteria?
Also, in my opinion focusing on a single asset like this is not the way to go at all. Could be really good for a period if it’s doing well but the reverse is also true.
Hey Steve,
No this is not what it means. What it does is take the data you are using and it changes a % of the total bars by a % ATR change.
Defaults are both 30% so if you are using 10k bars of data then a random 30k of the bars will be have the open prices modified by a 0-30% of the ATR at that time in the data randomly.
Essentially simulating using similar but slightly different data.
Hi Alex,
Great initial results! What symbols are you focused on?
Currently an ATR based stop (trailing or otherwise) has not been implemented in EA studio. I do know that it is on Popov’s but it could be up to a year until its implemented in EA studio and FSB pro from chatting with him. You can set a trailing stop though of course, there is no problem adding external modifications to EAs other than you will lose ability to manage any strategies with modification in EA studio which would definitely be a big disadvantage.
I’ve had success both closing my positions on Friday and not. I am a bit undecided what is best but for trend following strategies I wouldn’t want to close on a Friday.
I focus on forex so cant really comment on those assets. I’m sure Petko will respond soon.
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?
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 :-)
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 :-)
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.