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Forex Software → MT4 Sidekick (third party) → MT4 Sidekick - Demo Account Barometer
I used to toss these because there was a period of consecutive losses.....
Now I keep them because I feel that the risk of loss is well contained.... 2 losses and it stops for a while and that allows me to use more of the strategies.
Yep -- that's exactly how I intended it to be used. You're noticing the consecutive losses using FSB's equity charts. I noticed the consecutive wins and losses using MT4 Tracker -- it was just easier for me to see.
Also, using MT4 Strategy Tester there are metrics for Average Consecutive Wins and Losses -- which is pretty interesting. For most strategies, wins and losses do not alternate -- they really run in streaks. And I suspect this is because each strategy is trained for recognizing patterns in different chunks of data -- which is the insight I gained from you.
I've also added a couple of metrics to AccountStatistics.cs that help me track consecutive wins and losses of each strategy and it is very clear that good strategies trade in streaks -- and the streaks are longer than what you would expect if you simply looked at the win ratio.
Hey Steve....
Your efforts have assisted many to move to a better dimension in automated trading, an immeasurable impact you are making!
I am sure that in another while you will have another discovery that will shake things up further. Please continue to forge ahead.
Kudos.......
Thanks for the kind words -- I appreciate it. And, of course, one should never forget we stand on the shoulders of giants. Popov's software and this forum transformed the way I thought about and approached Forex trading -- y'all deserve the credit. Things would be much more boring if not for FSB and EA Studio.
Hi Sleytus a practical question for you
1. Suppose I created EA 33018 with 3 EAs(33018001,33018002,33018003)
2. Suppose I installed and run correctly it to Sidekick in Demo and Live
3. Suppose I create a new or updated EA 33018 with 4 EAs (33018001,33018002,33018003,33018004) and 33018003 is an updated version of the old 33018003 EA with same name.
What is the correct and faster procedure to update the old EA 33018 with the new EA 33018 using Sidekick in Demo and Live account? i.e. copy new files on top of old ones and run Refresh?
It is a common problem I think for everybody using Sidekick, so please try to be specific.
Hello GD,
I think I understand your question -- but, if not, please try again. Sometimes it takes a couple of iterations before I grasp what someone is asking.
1. Let's take the situation where the only change to EA 33018 is you've now added strategy 33018004. No change to Sidekick is required. You'll simply add your new EA to the Demo and Live accounts. Since Sidekick simply keeps track of trades via Magic Numbers, then it has no clue you've modified EA 33018. It will continue to update 3301800[1-3] as before, and it will also start tracking 33011804. Sidekick does not interact directly with the EA -- it simply uses Account History provided by MT4.
2. Let's take the situation where you've now modified 33018003. Since you are using the same Magic Number, then Sidekick will continue to update the stats for that Magic Number. I mean, this is what you would expect, right? It has no way of knowing whether or not 33018003 is the same as before or has been modified.
If you are asking that Sidekick not treat 33018003 as before and start fresh, this is not possible. Sidekick uses the Account History to collect stats. The trades from the first version of strategy 33018003 are carved in stone. If you've modified 33018003 such that you want it to be treated differently, then simply give it a new Magic Number. If you don't want the old version of 33018003 to trade anymore, then do not include it in the updated portfolio EA.
I think MT4 supports up to 10-digit Magic Numbers (up to 2147483648). So, unless you are approaching 2 billion individual strategies, then Magic Numbers should not be limiting (and, of course, I am joking).
Hope this answers your question but, if not, please try again and I'll do a better job.
Hi Sleytus
When you say "add" to live and Demo account, do you mean,
1. write on top of old 33018 EA, the new mq4 and ex4 files in DEMO and LIVE, without to change any other option in the EA parameters which run already in the two corresponded charts?
2. run Refresh (right click inside metatrader navigator expert advisors lists of DEMO and LIVE account)???
Hello GD,
I mean #2 -- that is, you would treat the new version *exactly* as if this were the first time the EA was used.
After rebuilding you'll copy it to the folder ..\MQL4\Experts (and overwrite the previous version). If you currently have a chart open with the old EA then that means MT4 still has it loaded in memory. You can either close that chart and open a new chart and attach the new version, or you can leave the chart open and press 'Refresh' (in which case MT4 will unload the old version and load the new one).
In either case you will need to again adjust input parameters. In other words, after overwriting the old version you would treat the new version exactly as if you were running the EA the first time.
Hi Sleytus
Strange things today
1. I use onTimer portfolio EA
I run one EURUSD in H1 Demo account and one EURUSD in H1 Live Account. I use the win/loss 0.65 rule Policy 1
No problems with installation of sidekick.
After few trades I realized trades in Live account which did not exist in Demo account and the opposite!!!
2. I use onTimer portfolio EA
I run one USDJPY in M15 Demo and one USDJPY in M15 Live Account. I use the 2:1 rule Policy 2
No problems with installation of sidekick again.
No problems with trades in this time. Trades made on same time, with no problems
Any suggestion?
Hi Sleytus
In addition to previous comment...
I tried to run the same things using OnTick and EAs could not load, giving a comment to do something.
It can be useful if i can use sidekick with OnTick NOT for portfolio but with every FSBPro EA in some cases.
Hello GD,
I'll try to answer your questions...
After few trades I realized trades in Live account which did not exist in Demo account and the opposite!!!
Demo and Real accounts will *always* trade differently because they use different data feeds, different spreads, no trading queues, and who knows what else. Also, you didn't say if you are using the same broker for your Demo and Real accounts.
Regardless -- Sidekick does not monitor trades. It is not a signal copier. What it can do is monitor the *performance* of strategies in a Demo account. The assumption is if your strategy performs well in a Demo account then there is a good chance it will perform well in a Real account. The fact that trading is not identical is a price we pay when using Demo accounts.
There is a solution -- instead of using a Demo account you could substitute a Real "micro" account. In other words, the Real "micro" account serves as the barometer.
I tried to run the same things using OnTick and EAs could not load
That's correct. FSB-generated strategies are complex and take a lot of time to execute -- especially when your portfolio EA includes dozens of strategies. Under these conditions OnTick doesn't work -- not all strategies get executed within the time slice that MT4 allows for each tick. That is why Portfolio Maker only supports OnTimer. (NOTE: You can use OnTick when backtesting using MT4's Strategy Tester).
It can be useful if i can use sidekick with OnTick NOT for portfolio but with every FSBPro EA in some cases.
Probably the most amazing feature of Popov's software is its ability to generate dozens and dozens of high quality strategies. And, for now, that is all I'm interested in. Perhaps in the future I'll modify Sidekick to work with single strategies -- including EA Studio-generated, FSB-generated, and custom-coded. So, for now, the focus is on portfolios.
Hi Sleytus
I understood
In my MT4 I use two portfolios one with USDJPY M15 and one with EURUSD H1 in Demo and Live account.
OnTImenr, ProtfolioMaker and Sidekick.
Some times there is delay in execution of orders by my broker, by 1-5 minutes in Demo but also in Live account (!) by using portfoliomaker and sidekick. I use detailed statement to check.
In Expert Terminal reports, I can see some yellow triangles.
I cannot be sure that your software is the reason as even with single EAs made by FSBpro the same phenomenon is observed!!!
Is it a normal situation?
What to do?
Hi sleytus
As I said I use M15 USDJPY and H1 EURUSD
I attach you a proof of what I receive
There ia also a sidekick failure. Is it Ok this message?
What is the meaning of these triangles?
What to do?
Some times there is delay in execution of orders by my broker, by 1-5 minutes in Demo but also in Live account (!)
I don't have an answer for this. I suspect most brokers have one issue or another. From this forum I learned to stick with longer time frames -- I'll only trade H1 and H4 -- and, so, these types of delays have less affect and I have not been paying attention to them.
There ia also a sidekick failure. Is it Ok this message?
Those messages are fine -- actually, they are a good sign. They prove that Sidekick is working. When a strategy in your Real account detects a signal but has not yet passed the threshold (i.e. WinRatio or Consecutive Wins) then the signal is ignored. Those messages report that a signal was ignored.
Hi all,
I'm interested in knowing how your MT4 Sidekick accounts are performing. I've come to the conclusion that building EAs is only part of the game, and that the most difficult part is to know when to start trading live an EA and when to stop trading it. And if that task (starting and removing EAs from a live account) can be done automatically that will be a very convenient way to work.
Using EA Studio or ForexSB I can build hundreds of EAs. However most of them won't be profitable in the long run and only a few will last a little longer. I guess that is because of how I build the EAs. I guess that if I could build my EAs better (=use more out of sample periods of different data, make them pass a lot more reliable tests, etc) I think those EAs would be a lot more reliable. But the EAs I usually build right now are not going to stay profitable for too much time. I've found the EAs I build in 5min TF are less durable than the ones built for the H4 timeframe, but in any case, a decission point about when to start trading live the EA, and a second decission about when to stop trading it, must be made.
That is why I wanted to ask you all about your MT4 Sidekick results. How are your accounts performing? Do you think the MT4 Sidekick model works or on the contrary there seems to be a problem with the method? I use mainly EA Studio and not so much FSB Pro, so I haven't tested myself MT4 Sidekick. I have tried to manually do the same that MT4 Sidekick does, using reports from MT4 Tracker, but my results haven't been very good so far. It seems to me that the losses of the losing EAs even if they are less frequent than the wins and even if I stop trading those losing EAs outperform the wins and the account is not yet profitable.
So, what do you think? are your MT4 sidekick accounts working well? Your criteria about starting and stopping the EAs are working for you?
Thanks a lot in advance.
Best regards RJ
Hello RJ -- thanks for restarting this thread...
I've had modest success with MT4 Sidekick -- but nothing to boast about and still consider it a work in progress. I continue to believe that using a live Demo account can be valuable in terms of monitoring which strategies currently perform well and using that as a barometer or guide to determine which strategies to enable / disable in a Real account.
A few weeks ago GD contacted me about some problems he was having with Portfolio Maker and Sidekick -- he also sent me his files so I was able to reproduce what he was seeing. Turns out his individual strategies have more trades than the corresponding portfolio EA generated by Portfolio Maker. Since Sidekick works with portfolio EAs generated by Portfolio Maker then Sidekick wasn't helping him much.
I don't know if you've been following my posts about OnTimer versus OnTick. When a portfolio EA includes many strategies -- e.g. 60 or 80 -- then OnTick doesn't work. But, as GD showed me, a portfolio EA with his 20 strategies doesn't work well with OnTimer. And he was right. I don't yet have a solution. The only thing I can say with some certainty is that portfolio EAs generated by Portfolio Maker can be used with MT4 Strategy Tester to test large number of strategies. But I'm not so sure about using that same portfolio in a live account (Demo or Real). Lately I've been trading individual strategies -- around 25 per terminal session (i.e. 25 charts). Also, around the time GD contacted me my broker deactivated the Demo account I had been using for Sidekick and I lost a few months of data (I didn't know the account was good for only 3 months). This didn't help with my Sidekick testing.
Going forward, I plan to modify Sidekick to work with individual strategies -- something that GD recommended.
As an aside, strategies created by FSB Pro are rather complex and execute a lot of code. Bundling a lot of them into a single, portfolio EA that is then forced to execute thousands of lines of code with each tick may not work well with MT4's single-threaded model -- regardless whether OnTick or OnTimer is used. Portfolio EAs generated by EA Studio are more light-weight -- plus the indicators used by EA Studio are built-into MT4 -- so, there is less external code to execute with each tick.
So, what do you think? are your MT4 sidekick accounts working well? Your criteria about starting and stopping the EAs are working for you?
I don't have a clear picture yet because of the problem with large portfolio EAs generated by Portfolio Maker. I need to modify Sidekick to work with individual strategies and EA Studio so that more people will try using it and we can collect more feedback. I think most people would agree it would be valuable for strategies to be dynamically and automatically turned ON/OFF, and what better way than using a Demo account? I think the tricky part is what the "policies" should be that control which strategies are allowed to trade and which aren't.
Hi Sleytus
Time to talk
1)For FSB Pro, I think we just need an extra button to select portfolio with Sidekick (as it is) or one by one output with new magic numbers for each automatically using a Magic number Base
For EA Studio it can be done almost the same way (you never Know what will work)
Then with try and error we can find a solution.
2) please permit to use any combination of accounts with no error messages i.e
Demo1 Demo2
Demo1 Demo1
Demo1 Live1
Live1 Live2
Live1 Live1
So we can use 0.01 for account 1 and 0.1 for account2 and test
Sidekick if it will work is a fine idea.
GD
Hello,
I've installed Sidekick on my VPS, i entered the licence key and installed it.
Nevertheless when I attach the Sidekick EA onto a chart, I'll alwaysget the message "Invalid licence key"
and the journal shows: SidekickEA EURUSD,H1: initialization failed (1)
What is wrong there?
Best regards
It's working now, so you can ignore my post.
...Time to talk...
Hi GD -- sorry for my delayed response, I don't check the forum as frequently as I used to.
I'm working on a new version of MT4 Sidekick that I think should address the issues you raise. The new version includes a Windows application similar to MT4 Tracker and allows finer control over which strategies are allowed to run or are temporarily paused. Also, it should allow you to use any combination of accounts.
I continue to like the idea of using a Demo account as a "barometer" to guide which strategies are currently allowed to trade. Below is what I've learned about Demo accounts -- most people will disagree. It is a total waste of time to spend months practice trading a strategy in a Demo account, thinking that after several months you can add it to a Real account and it will perform the same. Everyone does this, everyone loses, and no one learns. There are a couple of reasons why this rarely works:
(1) Market conditions change. Since a strategy is an algebraic formula with hard-coded constant settings, then it is not logical to expect it to yield the same answer using today's data compared to old data in the Demo account.
(2) There is a "disconnect" between Demo and Real accounts. They use different data, Demo doesn't really trade (i.e. queue real orders), different spreads, different "this", different "that", and so on.
On the other hand, Demo accounts are useful in the following ways:
(1) Though most people want to believe that Demo and Real accounts perform synchronously and you can compare strategies running in Demo and Real account "trade-by-trade", this simply is not the case. However, in general, strategies that currently run in Demo and Real account probably perform similarly. And this is what I want to take advantage of.
(2) If you have many strategies, then a Demo account might help you rank strategies from "best-to-worst" under current market conditions. But if you test too long, then market conditions change and the ranking no longer applies to current market conditions.
(3) The idea behind MT4 Sidekick is to simultaneously trade Demo and Real accounts. Based on how a strategy ***currently*** performs in the Demo account, then it may or may not be paused in the Real account.
There are people who only trade Demo accounts -- and that's fine. MT4 Sidekick provides no value to them. However, if you trade Real accounts then using a Demo account as a guide or "barometer" as to how your strategy trades under ***current*** market conditions can provide an edge. And I think this is the best that can be expected.
I will let you know when the new version is available for testing.
Thanks!!!
Hi,
Sidekick do not support Porfolio of EA Studio but If I Generate EA with EA Studio and build the portfolio with Portfolio Maker it will work ?
Thankyou
Steve,
Perhaps this has been mentioned already.
As you are aware, the balance line of strategy backtest has two components - the long position part (green) and the short position part (red).
Have you considered using a Sidekick activation policy based upon either of these parts alone? Say a moving average of the long position only?
Often I noticed that a strategy's long position side will be far more profitable than its short side, or vice versa.
Samuel
If I Generate EA with EA Studio and build the portfolio with Portfolio Maker it will work ?
No. Portfolio Maker works with FSB-generated strategies only. This is because it needs to parse and merge the code of multiple strategies into one portfolio EA. Strategies generated by EA Studio and FSB are not coded the same -- though there are similarities.
Have you considered using a Sidekick activation policy based upon either of these parts alone?
I am aware of the long and short components. MT4 Sidekick is simply used to toggle strategies ON/OFF based on their performance. It doesn't (and shouldn't) get involved with logic.
When you notice a strategy's long component performs better than its short component then you might consider adding the 'Long or Short' indicator to one of your slots. In this way (a) you can take advantage of the better long performance, and (b) all the logic remains within the strategy.
I've used the 'Long or Short' indicator a lot -- but in hindsight I'm not sure if it really helped much. Besides looking at the two components you also should look at the price curve. In your example the price chart (light gray) is clearly trending up -- so, of course, the long component should out-perform the short component. And if it didn't then I'd say the strategy was broken. When I look at these charts I pay attention to how the long and short components perform relative to the price chart. If the price trends up then I expect the long component to go up and the short component to rarely trade and appear horizontal. If the price trends down then I look for the opposite behavior. Does that make sense?
In your example look at the beginning of the chart where the long and short components cross -- that is almost exactly the point where the price chart changes from a steep downward trend to a steep upward trend.
I am aware of the long and short components. MT4 Sidekick is simply used to toggle strategies ON/OFF based on their performance. It doesn't (and shouldn't) get involved with logic.
When you notice a strategy's long component performs better than its short component then you might consider adding the 'Long or Short' indicator to one of your slots. In this way (a) you can take advantage of the better long performance, and (b) all the logic remains within the strategy.
I've used the 'Long or Short' indicator a lot -- but in hindsight I'm not sure if it really helped much. Besides looking at the two components you also should look at the price curve. In your example the price chart (light gray) is clearly trending up -- so, of course, the long component should out-perform the short component. And if it didn't then I'd say the strategy was broken. When I look at these charts I pay attention to how the long and short components perform relative to the price chart. If the price trends up then I expect the long component to go up and the short component to rarely trade and appear horizontal. If the price trends down then I look for the opposite behavior. Does that make sense?
In your example look at the beginning of the chart where the long and short components cross -- that is almost exactly the point where the price chart changes from a steep downward trend to a steep upward trend.
Thanks Steve for your response.
Do you think it would be helpful if Sidekick toggled strategies ON/OFF by following the long and short components vs the strategy as one unit? I understand your point of how the long component wins during a upswing. If this be so, why not have Sidekick trigger off the long component then, and exclude the short component? Leaving the logic intact, can Sidekick monitor the long component only and trigger off that?
Just a thought.
Samuel
If this be so, why not have Sidekick trigger off the long component then, and exclude the short component? Leaving the logic intact, can Sidekick monitor the long component only and trigger off that?
Sidekick monitors the WinRatio of your strategies in a Demo account. Furthermore, it could keep track of the WinRatio of BUYS and SELLS. However, if the current WinRatio of BUYS is higher than the WinRatio of SELLS would you really want Sidekick to block future SELLS? And if it were to block future SELLS, then how would it ever know when the trend changes and its better to SELL than BUY?
Sorry -- I just don't get it. When you ask "why not have Sidekick trigger off the long component then, and exclude the short component" I don't know what you mean. How would Sidekick know what the long and short components are? In Popov's charts the long and short "components" are simply the summation of the BUYS and SELLS as a function of time.
In the past 1.5 years I've done a lot of trading and looking at data. I've given up trying to predict the future. However, I do feel there is an edge to be had by toggling strategies ON/OFF based on how they are currently trading. Strategies are very simple algebraic formulas -- they perform well when the current market data matches with the data they were trained with, and they trade poorly when the current market data differs from the data they were trained with. Using a Demo account gives you a way to determine whether or not a strategy recognizes current market data without risking any money. And Sidekick is used to pass that insight from a Demo account to a Real account.
Forex Software → MT4 Sidekick (third party) → MT4 Sidekick - Demo Account Barometer
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