Help required with Reactor settings

[Samuel Jackson]

Hi Steve, yes you are right in EA studio you can only create a single asset portfolio. But can check the combined results manually easily enough.

Also I would say that expecting 7 months results to be good for a strategy only developed using 2 years of data on M5 is also pretty unrealistic.

2-3 months would be a better wf amount in my opinion.

Also remember you are not managing robots in anyway with that system but simply putting them on and leaving them for 7 months (which is ages).

[Samuel Jackson]

Yes I agree with Petko on large stop loss and small take profit being able to work well.

Your logic is reasonable, however remember it is the average winning trade / average losing trade x the probability of winning that is important.

For example what would you prefer:

Strategy A: 1:1 stop loss or take profit ratio with a 60% win/loss ratio

Strategy B: 2:1 stop loss to take profit ratio but with a 80% win/loss ratio

Let’s use 100 dollars risk as an example;

Strategy A should make 10 trades and win 600 and lose 400 which will mean 200 profit with a profit ratio of 1.5

Strategy B should make 10 trades and win 400 and lose 200 which is also 200 profit but has a profit ratio of 2

That example is only expecting a much smaller relative increase in probability of winning against a halving of the tp/sl ratio also and still outperforms it.

The probability of the trades winning combined with the risk to reward ratio of each trade is what’s important.

[Samuel Jackson]

Also it’s by design that Ea studio portfolio only does a single asset portfolio. It’s purpose is to create a portfolio expert advisor that can only be attached to a single chart so all the strategies in the portfolio must be for the same symbol and timeframe.

I initially thought it would be good to have a feature to do a combined asset portfolio but its not something I would use anymore even if it existed actually.

[SteveM2025]

Thanks Samuel, you are being super helpful.

All of that makes sense, but this comment caught my eye:

“2-3 months would be a better wf amount in my opinion.

Also remember you are not managing robots in anyway with that system but simply putting them on and leaving them for 7 months (which is ages).”

Apologies what did you mean by “wf”? Again my mindset here has been  – what robots can I  identify and then just leave on charts indefinitely, knowing that they always trade on profitable win rate over the long term. But it sounds like you manage your robots and swapping them in and out on a more frequent basis, is that right? How then do you determine which ones to swap in and which to swap out?

Do let me know, I should add I am going through two of Petko’s courses:

Forex Strategy Course + 12 EAs I Trade Live
EA Studio Professional Course

…so if the answer is in there, feel free to tell me to review those courses first!

[Samuel Jackson]

No worries Steve, glad it makes sense and is helpful 🙂

Thats fair enough in wanting to leave them on indefinitely however I believe there should be some ongoing tuning of the EAs wether that be to keep the same EAs and tune them ongoingly as Petko does in the top 12 course you are going through.Or switch out new robots monthly like is done in the professional course.

Or you can manage your robots by moving too performing EAs from a demo account to live or mock live account (which is just an alternative way of achieveing the same thing as is performed in the professional course without demo trading really)

i personally prefer just managing my robots by having lots on demo and then using FXBlue to monitor and select the EAs but it’s the same as professional course method so just a preference.

[Samuel Jackson]

Also I think that for finding EAs that will work long term I would be putting say 100 or so EAs that you have generated onto a demo account and just leave them trading for a few months and then view the results, but a quicker way would be to run the reactor with an end date set the 3 months in the past and then use the validator to check how they performed for the 3 month walk forward.

It all depends on how proficient and confident that you can match EA studio with demo trading effectively.

In my opinion people new to EA studio should start out managing with demo for a while before transitioning to purely using Ea studio to manage a pool of EAs.

[SteveM2025]

Thanks again Samuel

I have now watched those lectures on Petko’s professional course re identifying the 12 balanced robots and swapping them monthly. This is very different to the approach I have been instinctively pursuing, but it is one I am going to try straight away. I have seen many an EA do brilliantly on demo, and then totally flop when I switch it to live, which is why i thought i just need to worry about the 2-3 year picture and not worry about the 3-4 month stagnation periods. My thinking has been  – Maybe i have just been unlucky in switching performing EAs to live accounts after good periods and at the start of stagnation periods.

Re Petko’s approach – I’m intrigued as to why last 6 month performance, and then last 1 month performance is a strong indicator of good performance in month 7, but not beyond. Any views / insight on that?

Also I note in the professional course that this method – ie swapping out 12 balanced EAs each month was being demonstrated in November 2020.
Petko (or Samuel if you follow this approach) can you confirm this approach is still working in August 2022, and also provide some performance information for this approach over the last 21 months since Nov 2020, ie how many months of profit / how many months were not profitable, what has been the average profit per month etc etc.

Thank you

[Samuel Jackson]

Regarding Petkos 6 month and 1 month, I believe Petko has determined through experience that it works well and has some logical sense but I’m sure he will confirm his reasons when you reads this.

My feel for these date ranges is that the longer filter is serving as more of a general robustness test of the EA and then the shorter filter serving as a selection based on what is performing best on a shorter more recent timeframe. Wether 12 months and 2 months or 4 months and 2 weeks may perform better I don’t know.

Also It’s not to say that the Ea won’t perform well after a month but just that the process should be repeated on a reasonably frequent basis to adapt to changing market conditions.

I agree with the logic of the approach and certainly used to get good results on demo when I started out using it. I remember my first months results were 50% profit that steadily grew over the month (using 10k account and 0.1 lot size) but I personally would be at least halfing my lot size in order to reduce my risk.

I would practice it for a few months and see how you get on (using demo account of course). Fairly easy to run other tests alongside it as it only takes a couple of hours at most once a month.

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