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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.
Hey Tanya,
Great to see you are moving forward, and glad you appreciate my help and your kind words ;-)
So my first point would be that it seems you switch the EAs every 2 weeks? This is fine but 2 weeks and 4 weeks together as selection is pretty similar. I would suggest as one of your filter tests you try just a simple filter of moving the EAs that have been profitable over the whole life on you demo account with over 5 trades (say 1.1 pf) and then as the life of your incubator account extends you could add an additional filter for the most recent month also.
Let’s say now you have a collection of 100 EAs in your pool, in three months you validate and only 50 of them have traded as profitable (or even just broken even) over the last 3 months. Move those 50 to a second tier pool for example that only has strategies that have performed suitably over three months on demo in real-time.
Over time you will build a pool of EAs that is higher quality, you could even repeat the exercise on your tier 2 pool after 6 months say and move all the ones passing that to a tier 3 pool.
Hope that makes sense? It’s just a suggestion of how you could build a higher quality pool of robots over time, you of course need a combination of good robots and sensible filter criteria to make profits.
While you are practicing and learning if you do this as a side then over a year you could make a really nice quality pool of strategies for yourself.
Of course nothing to stop you trying another pair combination in tandem Tanya. If pairs are working better for you then try combining them as it is likely that your pool of EAs for these pairs are higher quality (which can be partly lucky sometimes as it is very possible to run the reactor with exact same settings and pick top 10 the exact same what and one with far more overoptimised poorer quality EAs than the other.
This is one of the main reasons it’s important to test them appropriately out of sample, starting with using demo accounts (and patience) and progressing to using EA studio without the demo as your experience grows.
Hey Tanya and Petko,
I can add a few points:
Tanya uses IC markets for both demo and mock live account and I know that she validates the strategies using the IC markets broker data.
Although I didn’t select these pairs I advised Tanya to do what I do which is to select 4 pairs to trade together that are as uncorrelated as possible. They look good to me? Also the mix of timeframes M15, H1 and H4 also works well for minimizing correlation on the same symbol.
I’ve got two of those pairs in my own portfolio at the moment and it’s been trading really well :-)
Can you confirm the above is correct Tanya :-)
As to the poor results Tanya:
You have at least a month of trading on the demo and at least a few trades when deciding how to move EAs right?
How many EAs are you putting on your mock live at a time?
Also you could try a few different mock live accounts at the same time and trial a few different selection methods?
But to answer the original question Tanya (at last :-):
My advice would be to maintain a pool of collections and then check them every 3 months or so using the validator for the most recent three months of data, then remove the ones that don’t perform well over the last three months and keep doing this ongoingly.
Over time you will build a higher quality pool.
The higher quality your pool of strategies the less need to continually create more.
Also keep things simple when moving the EAs, just a good profit factor and more than 5 trades for example over the last month.
Keep the demo running as long as possible and keep replacing the strategies that are performing poorly. This is why I actually prefer to work with single EAs rather than portfolio EAs as it makes it cleaner to just remove an EA that’s performing poorly and then replace it with a new one.
Keep practicing as you are Tanya, things will improve with practice, it sounds simple enough but it does take a while to get the knack of things :-)
Hi Alan,
I assume you mean download to another folder?
This is controlled by your browser. Just go into your chrome settings and change the default download folder in there.
Regarding the slight out of balance in terms of USD is not a problem at all in my opinion with all those suggested pairs.
I think stick with what has been working, and experiment with small changes at a time rather than a large overhaul.
Yes 10 different strategies on EURUSD can be a balanced portfolio. I would prefer they were spread over different periods though. 2-3 for M15, M30,H1 and H4 would be better.
Yeah I’d think once you have enough on EURUSD move to different pairs. 1000 is more than enough in your pool for any single pair and timeframe though.
Hi Tanya,
As you had sent me you collection I was able to check this quickly for you. First of all I changed the dates to 11/05/2017 and 11/05/2022 (since 05/11/2022 is a few months into the future so I assumed a typo?).
I have run it using IC Broker data and Premium data including Monte Carlo and there are 121 strategies passing for premium data validation and 176 for IC broker data.
This is totally fine, it is likely that many only marginally passed the acceptance criteria for IC and only marginally failed for IC data. Also plenty could have been overfit to the data used to generate (IC?) and therefor aren’t performing as well on different broker data which is a good robustness test and best to lose those strategies anyway.
You can also simply load the full 204 collection into EA studio and open up each strategy individually and see how the chart looks when you change between the data sources and remove the ones that differ too much, should give similar results. Probably about an hours work for 204 strategies but a good exercise.
All is well, these results seem very reasonable to me. The broker data wont be hugely different but it can be different enough to get these results.
It’s not really a problem having so many strategies, it will help you find strategies faster as you are able to skip the generator having to find strategies from scratch. Just make sure to keep them tidy I guess.
What about other pairs and timeframes? You should focus on building these up if you are approaching too many for EURUSD M15.
Also once you have a big collection this will allow you to run the reactor less often and just use the validator going forward to ensure your pools keep passing the validator settings or also if you decide to change your strategy requirements by modifying the acceptance criteria you will have a large group of strategy’s to begin with.
I would pick the pairs and symbols that you want a pool for, build each up and then going forward use the validator to maintain and keep current and the Reactor to top up as needed going forward.
Hi Alan, having too many strategies really isn’t much of a problem. But lets say the you are aiming for roughly 1000 strategies in your pool per symbol timeframe pair.
If at the end of the month you have 2000 and want to trim a bit you could load your existing collections into the validator in chunks to get the best 250-300 and then just keep the final 3-4 collections that come out of the validator. Also as you will be moving the validator end date forward a month some may just naturally fail the acceptance criteria and if you are getting too many passing you can simply increase the acceptance criteria a little and filter the top 300 however you want when you run them through the validator.
How many strategies are you expecting to have??