[Simon]

Hi Andi,

That sounds interesting, and like a good way to cut out a lot of work – I currently am uploading each EA to MT5 (sadly no portfolio capability yet with MT5 😐 ) and naming, uploading, compiling, and attaching to charts takes a lot of time, not to mention tring to keep track of all the EA’s on all the different MT5 platforms and all the different accounts!

Do you use Walk Forward and Monte Carlo? In theory, using these in the Reactor can eliminate demo trading too?

As I write this, I have set the Reactor to run for three days, it is currently at 23% of it’s run and has ascended eight strategies. I will keep running the Reactor until it has 99 strategies, and then think about what to do with them.

I’ll keep you posted 🙂

[Simon]

Hi Roman,

Thanks for the reply.

No, I have not re-imported any strategies  back into EA Studio, in fact, I have never used this feature, too busy exporting EA’s!

Can I ask your advice?, if I re-import them, will the names I have given them and the magic numbers be affected? I have spent considerable time organising them, and would like to keep them that way!

I hope they will stay intact, because I see that your point is a good one, and would seem to be the easy way to check for correlations.

I understand what you say about the likelihood of correlations, although I have not been doing this for as long as you have, so have yet to see patterns emerge.

Cheers!

[Simon]

Hi again Petko,

I Just thought of another wish..

I have read about some of us who use different strategies for different market conditions, I would love to know more about

a) how to figure out what kind of market conditions a strategy is good for

b) how to make a strategy for particular market conditions

c) how to manage strategies for particular market conditions

Cheers!

[Simon]

Hi Petko,

We are the ones who should be thanking YOU!

Your education has finally given structure to my approach, and I’m so glad I came across your material in 2019, and what a lot you have accomplished, Bravo!!

My wish is similar to some that are above, I would very much like to know more about using FSB Pro, in particular, for generating strategies that make use of the longer timeframes feature. Many of the strategies I am currently generating with EA Studio enter trades at what, to me looks like a very bad time, buying at the top of a move, selling at the bottom etc, and I feel like some better entries could be found when using the longer timeframes feature in FSB Pro.

I know I could change the parameters and AC in EA Studio a bit to try and improve the entries, but figuring that out is another story!

But in any case, thanks for all you do!

 

Happy New Year everyone! 🙂

[Simon]

Thanks for the replies, Petko and Andi.

I’ll try your criteria Andi, fund my live account with a little currency, and see how I get on.

Cheers!

[Simon]

Thanks Petko,

Haha yes, I keep my machine running in the attic, where my little one can’t reach. Yet!

[Simon]

Thanks for your reply Petko.

Regarding the second part of your process, would it be right to say that we are looking for around 20 trades per month for an EA?

And are you validating existing EAs on the all of the original data plus the recent month? So the data horizon is always growing? Would there be a point where there are too many bars for a particular timeframe?

Thanks,

Simon

[Simon]

Hi Charbel,

I don’t think losing strategies will be shown, I think there is built in criteria that if a strategy makes less than 0.10 of currency, it is a loser and not shown to you.

I’m pretty new to Algo trading as well.

What I have learnt from Petko is that most, if not all, strategies have winning phases and losing phases. Do not waste time looking for the perfect strategy. The way we get around the losing phases is to have so many strategies working at once, that the losers don’t matter, because the winners are winning more than the losers are losing.

Petko’s education and the software give us the tools to generate robust strategies that put the odds in our favour.

It is not a case of finding a perfect strategy, and giving up your job. It will take time and work on a regular basis, like growing a garden, you have to nurture the good strategies and weed out the bad.

EA Studio is the sunshine!

Learn how to use it, the amount of work it does for you is amazing.

Recently, Petko posted that it had calculated ten million strategies in three days. I’m pretty sure it would take me longer than that to calculate ten million strategies manually!

Now that I have seen how difficult it is to find a decent strategy, sometimes even for EA Studio, I feel bad for those who trade manually by staring at screens waiting for an entry. They are spending weeks/months/years experimenting with a single strategy that EA Studio might throw in the trash in less than a second!

My advice is, invest in EA Studio, invest in Petko’s education, learn all the different ways it can be used, and in time the profits will come.

Start experimenting with the acceptance criteria:

Minimum profit factor: 1.1

Minimum count of trades: 500

Maximum drawdown %: 15

In Sample: Minimum profit factor: 1.1

Out Of Sample: Minimum profit factor: 1.1

You could just run the Generator with these settings, and see what comes out, which will be raw strategies, with no robustness validation.

Or you could get EA Studio to do more work for you, and run the settings on the Reactor, and set the extra modules there to perform the robustness testing for you.

Lately, I have been using the Reactor with Walk Forward Optimization with out-of-sample settings, Walk Forward validation with out-of-sample settings, and Monte Carlo.

I run the generator for 1440 minutes (24hrs) and usually end up with between three and ten strategies in the collection.

Running it for 24hrs means I can set time each day to repeat the process for different forex pairs and timeframes.

Because EA Studio has done all the work for me, I trust that the strategies are robust, and put the straight into Metatrader Demo for testing.

Then if the results in FX Blue are good I will move them to a live account.

Good luck!

[Simon]

And when you say there are many other things that we can diversify the risk with, can you give some examples?

Maybe another timeframe?

Different types of strategies for different market conditions? (Not sure how to go about creating these, or when to implement them – maybe they just run constantly on a hedging basis?)

Thanks

Simon

[Simon]

Thanks Petko.

 

I’ve been meaning to ask, what minimum count of trades would you set for each timeframe?

I remember in another post you gave a guideline as to how many bars we should run the Reactor with for each timeframe, I suppose the minimum number of trades would be different for each TF too?

[Simon]

Hi Charbel,

 

I have yet to experiment with that parameter of the Acceptance Criteria, but my hunch is that looking for a 90% win rate is not too far off seeking the holy grail.

I don’t think there are many strategies that will meet such high demand.

Maybe if you run the generator long enough with only the 90% win/loss ratio set as acceptance criteria, you might have some luck?

All the best,

Simon.

[Simon]

Running everything on computers at home, would power-cuts be something to think about, potentially disconnecting trades for hours? Or fire risk, leaving the machine on all the time?

Would you use the same machine for generating strategies as you would for running demo and live MetaTraders?

[Simon]

Thanks Petko,

Yes, I have tried refreshing, and logging out and back in again.

Cheers,

Simon

[Simon]

Hi all!

Lately, I have been running the Reactor constantly, using Walk Forward optimization, Walk Forward validation, and Monte Carlo, and have been getting between 3 and 10 strategies into the collection each time for several different forex pairs on the M5 and M15 timeframes.

I had stopped demo trading for a while, as the strategies I was generating were failing badly, running a £1000 demo account down to £750.

With the new settings mentioned above, I have steadily built up approximately 50 EAs on the same demo account, and the balance is up to £ 870 after two weeks.

However, being that I am keeping notes of what the parameters of each EA are in a spreadsheet, I am noticing that I now have a lot of strategies that are very similar (Donchian Channel is a very, very popular indicator!), and most of the strategies have no TP, and even fewer have SL.

I read through all eleven pages of this post last night, and in an effort to implement better risk diversification, and at the same time, simplify and strengthen my strategy management method I have come up with the following plan.

It will be a lot of work, so before I embark on it, I would like to know if anyone here with some experience could add to, or advise any changes to it?

I have included some of your ideas here Jacpin, so would be very appreciative to hear your thoughts?!

EA Studio Algo Trading Plan

1) Forex pairs: EURUSD EURGBP USDJPY GBPJPY EURJPY GBPUSD AUDCAD AUDNZD NZDCAD

a) Have an even mix of each currency throughout portfolio
b) No currency appears more than three times
c) low spreads

2) Timeframes: M5, M15 and M30

3) Always 0.01 lot size, to keep it simple. Profits will come as the EA collection grows.

4) For risk diversification, create several types of Reactor settings for each timeframe. For instance:
a) one with no SL or TP
b) one with trailing SL and no TP
c) one with trailing SL and TP
d) one with Always SL and TP

5) Common Acceptance Criteria must always have:
a) minimum profit factor: 1.1
b) minimum count of trades: 300
c) maximum equity drawdown: 15 %
d) minimum 70% win/loss ratio
e) In Sample: minimum profit factor: 1.1
f) Out Of Sample: minimum profit factor: 1.1

6) Strategies that pass each set of Reactor settings to be tested in a separate MT5 demo account until FX Blue analysis decides if strategy is good enough to trade live

7) Using FX Blue, strategies that win minimum of 7 out of 10 trades will be moved to live after a minimum of two weeks testing

8) Using FX Blue, strategies that win less than 7 out of 10 trades will be deleted

9) Live strategies that win less than 7 out of 10 trades will be sent back to demo for monitoring

[Simon]

This is great Petko! Thank you so much!

I wonder what else I can say in this post to make it valid?

Did I mention I love your courses?!

[Author]

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