At least I don´t need to "opinionate" about the "Shift", because I know for a fact that it doesn´t mean that it generates bad strategies if using high "Shift" values. The contrary is actually true as I found in my many years of empiric research by creating strategies on different platforms. You´d wonder that some of my most profitable strategies are actually using high values for "Shift" of the "Moving Average". It´s a missed chance in my opinion if Express Generator / EA Studio always uses "0" for "Shift", as it will miss strategies like these that are highly profitable (that´s on 36 years of data and 2 years on MyFxBook).

As you can see, there can be VERY good strategies even with heavy "Shift" values and hence I´d appreciate it if you would consider adding randomization to "Shift" of the "Moving Average" indicator for Express Generator and EA Studio.

Thanks :-)

Correct!

> Otherwise, the Shift parameter would be pretty useless at least for the auto-generation.

Correct!

The shift introduces a lag. If I made it random between a range, it will mean that we will have almost always a shift with a value in the middle of the range. Obviously, we don't want that.

Another option is to have a probability to have a shift (let's say 5%) and then to have it within a range. However, it makes it very opinionated. For that reason, I "opinionated" it to 0.

The shift parameter is in EA Studio only because it is in MetaTrader (set to 0 by default)

For "Alligator", each shift is equal to the previous line period.
For "Moving Average", the Generator uses shift = 0.

looking at the thousands of strategies I´ve generated with Express Generator so far, I found that none of the strategies that use the "Alligator" or the "Moving Average" (the two only indicators that have a "Shift" parameter) ever have anything else than "0" for "Shift". It looks like Express Generator is not randomizing the "Shift" in both indicators and always uses "0". This is a pity as I have found good strategies in the past with EA Studio that use the "Shift" value with good results. I hope you can add randomization for the "Shift" in Express Generator too so that it isn´t always 0.

Thank you.