The way to go? Techniques for making profit

[Matthew Roberts]

Samuel,

Just wanted to pop in and say thanks for the suggestions. Going 20-200 helped me find more strategies and I played around with each pair a bit.

I first tried 24 months data, 30% OOS, H1 strategies, 300 trades, minimum PF 1.2, normalizer 30% OOS, Monte Carlo 1.1 PF 80% valid.

if I found enough strategies, great I ran with it.

Most didn’t, so I moved on to 30 months and if I found enough strategies I ran with it!

If not, then I switched the time frame from H1 to others and found that most that didn’t work on H1 worked on M15.

If after that I still could not find enough strategies, I gave up on the pair.

I found 7 of the 8 I tested to generate enough strategies. NZDUSD was not a success. Any ideas on that pair?

Anyways, I’ve been generating 1 pair per night. I put 5 pairs on an account so far. The account is up $7600.00 as I am typing this.

The max drawdown so far is $5600.00.

If this continues like this, I’ll be trading for a proprietary trading firm very soon.

Thank you Petko for making this forum available to us and thanks Samuel for the help 🙂

[Samuel Jackson]

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 🙂

[Matthew Roberts]

Actually, I had 5 of them generate enough on H1. So I stuck with those 5 only.

I have decided I’d still like to do more testing on M15 pairs before placing them on my FTMO trial.

Anyways here are the results of the last 4 days doing only H1 pairs.

I still have 11 more pairs to test out on H1 to see if I can generate enough.

The way things are looking though, I’m very happy with the results I see below.
If this does end up being consistent, the saying goes “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

I can always do more testing, but I want to focus the majority of my efforts on what is working.

[Samuel Jackson]

Hey Matthew,

You are definitely working things out and seem well on your way to that ftmo prize :-).

Its great to the the good results and I definitely agree. If it ain’t broke don’t fix it, sticking with a system is a major key to success. I got lost a while back jumping around and trying too many things too often.

keep it simple and if it ain’t broke don’t fix it are two excellent rules to live by in trading.

will be interesting to see your results when you get more pairs involved for sure!

[Alex C]

Hi,

I’m new here and started taking Petko’s courses. I ran the strategies created in the courses and tested them for more than a month managing them as shown in the videos on a weekly/monthly basis. I’m very happy with the past month:  

I have a couple of questions:

• What settings should I use to generate strategies for OIL/BRENT & DAX? How can I determine the SL/TP range, I saw some people talking about it but I don’t understand how they come up with those numbers
• Is there a way to generate EA’s taking 50% profit and let the rest run with a ATR trailing stop? Or adding an external EA that could manage this? Or is this not a good Idea?
• Do you close positions on Friday on your live accounts or not?

 

 

 

[Samuel Jackson]

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.

[Alex C]

Hi Samuel,

I took the Gold, Dow, EURUSD, GBPUSD, Crypto course, and the portfolio course I run them on demo and go through the steps like showed in the course… I run them on 3 different brokers. After posting it only went down, no positive weeks anymore… still in profit but I’m confused …

Can you also help determine what the minimum balance should be on a 1:30 leveraged account per trading pair/EA?

And what about Gold & Dow, how much should I add for each running EA? I have trouble understanding how you can determine that based on leverage etc….

[Petko Aleksandrov]

Hey Alex,

That depends on the brokers you use.

When you have a trade opened with an EA, check the margin in the terminal, and you will see exactly how much your broker blocked from your account for that particuar trade.

For example, with this picture shows how much is blocked from my account:

Do it with 0.1 so you can easily make the calculations for yourself.

[Samuel Jackson]

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

[Alex C]

Thanks for your answers…

With a 1:30 leveraged account and using 0.01 lotsize how much should I have on my account, because using the process you describe it is never a fixed amount of EA’s.

Also US30 has a minium lotsize of 0.10 on my broker, Gold and indexes tend to skew my results because of their pip value which is bigger…

Do you use an EA to manage risk, like closing all positions when the 5% is reached? Do you then wait for a month to put new EA’s in the market? IF you use an EA could you please share it? Do you also apply a max risk per EA?

 

[Alan Northam]

Hi Alex C,

I wanted to comment on your confusion as posted above “After posting it only went down, no positive weeks anymore… still in profit but I’m confused …”  If I am off base I hope Samuel or Petko will correct me.

When we create a strategy the balance line does not go straight up and will have periods of drawdowns.  So it makes sense to me that the strategy will have periods of draw downs in the future.  For example my portfolio of 10 strategies from 02/19/2022 through 08/19/2022 has a drawdown of 1.65%.  When I move my strategy forward from 03/19/2022 through 09/19/2022, which includes the most recent price action of the market, it has a current drawdown of 2.47%.  The current draw down is a little less than 1% greater (2.47% – 1.65%).  I attribute the current draw down I am experiencing at due to the current increased volatility in the market as due to recent economic conditions which is worse than the previous six months.  It is my belief that as we go through the months ahead there will be periods when my portfolio’s balance line will continue to move higher along with future periods of draw down.  So, while it may be frustrating to watch my portfolio go through the current drawdown I am not giving up.  I believe that my portfolio will continue to increase in value as I go through the months ahead.  So, in my opinion, I don’t think I would be confused yet. I would give it more time.

 

[Samuel Jackson]

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)

[Alex C]

I understand that an Equityline can’t go straight up. What I saw over the last weeks is that the active portfolio seems to make profits big profits on Monday and if it doensn’t the rest of the week is catastrophic (10%-20%). Also Friday’s seem to be profitable 80% of the time, do you consider eg. only putting EA’s on specific days when you see that other days aren’t profitable?

I also read about drawdowns of strategies and timing to put them in the market, running strategies on demo accounts and putting them up live when they have a drawdown on demo because you expect a recovery. Does anyone take this into practice or not?

Can someone tell help me determine how much robots I can best put on my 500$ account with 1:30 leverage and how I can calculate this for myself? I see that indexes and gold have a lot of impact on my strategy performance as the minimum lotsize is 0,10 for indices and gold tend to move more. What can I do about that on a small account?

 

[Samuel Jackson]

On this size of account I’d stick to forex and only open 0.01 lots size positions.

The easiest way is gonna be to just open a demo account with 10k balance and the same 30 leverage. Then open enough 0.2 lot size position manually until you hit about a 1/3 of your margin.

Since 10k/0.2 lot is the same as 0.5k/0.01 lot that will be the number of EAs you should trade on your 500 dollar account.

This should take 5 minutes to open a new account and 5 minutes to do you calc 🙂

[ARRR]

Thanks everyone for sharing your valuable experience.

[Author]

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