Re: Hannah's Trade/Portfolio Management Tips

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77 (edited by hannahis 2020-05-16 11:27:28)

Re: Hannah's Trade/Portfolio Management Tips

This post is to reply to another post elsewhere but I put it here to collate my comments in 1 place instead of scatter all around the forum.

It's taken from https://forexsb.com/forum/post/60638/#p60638

J02wQ5tHnWr wrote:

well above are my settings i use for generating strategies with the Reactor.
So i was wondering what i can improve to get a higher quality of strategies.
So far this week my indicated return for the total of the strategies i've generated of +5300 euro per/day
but i'm down 15445  euro so far (all demo naturally) in 4 days so i was wondering what i can improve

If i could improve my real result to 5% of the expectancy i would be very glad.


Thanks!

Hi Jo2

You may want to make some changes to your SL and Take Profit settings to being with...

1) Your SL range will determine the risk factor and entry accuracy and the type of EA your looking for

2) Your TP will determine the types of EA you search for and determine your risk/reward, win/loss ratio


1) Stop Loss range

Daily Market Volatility
If SL is too small and doesn't give "enough" room for daily market volatility, you ended up being stop out most of the time and suffer unnecessary loses.  i.e EA exit (stop out) prematurely during price fluctuation


Risk adverse traders may suffer greater loses when set unrealistic SL that is too small
If SL determine how much risk you are willing to risk per trade, however setting too small SL, you may end up suffer greater loses than the SL you set, eg many multiple SL combined.  So do set realistic SL according to the types of EA you are looking for.  If you are looking for Ranging EA, the SL is smaller compare to looking for a Breakout EA. 

How much SL to set?
When price moved beyond the usual std deviation or daily range and goes into a breakout, that's when you know you are in the opposite direction.  So you need to observe your chart and determine who much is the daily/weekly fluctuation before a breakout starts to happen.

Setting SL too large
If you set SL too large, you are giving too much room for mistake and essentially it means any lousy EA will pass this criteria.  You ended up with low risk/reward ratio because each loss is very huge loss but higher win/loss ratio.  Because your EA stay in the market longer (floating loss due to large SL), you hardly face any real lose and hence your win/loss ratio may look good but your risk/reward isn't impressive.

You also ended up with EA with very poor entry accuracy.  EA will large SL means that you can only run a few of such EA per capital and that means you have fewer EA in your portfolio to diversify.

Setting an optimal SL will improve your EA's entry accuracy and generate EA with better Profit factor.

What's the Optimal SL? 
SL with enough room for daily fluctuation but not too high when it can't recognize when a trade has really gone bad.  It all depends on what type of EA you are searching for? Ranging or Trending, positional EA, intra trading, swing etc.  Thus understand the characteristics of the type of EA you are searching will help you understand their trading behaviours and thus help you understand what settings to use.


2) Setting your Take Profit

TP determines how long you want to keep your position open and hence influence your risk/reward ratio.

It also depends on the Types of EA you are searching.  Setting TP 200 pips (2000 points) means you are primarily searching for Trending EA.  How often do you see markets move 200 pips in 1mth? This will also determine the number of trades you will ended up with in 1mth and the account stagnation you need to endure.

Search TP at 30-50 you are looking for ranging (depend on your currency pair's market volatility)

Search TP at 5 to 20 means you are looking for scalper (these suggestions are not cast in stone, if really depend what level of scapler, ranger or trending EA you are looking for, these settings are just examples).

When there is market uncertainties (ranging markets), you want don't want to keep too many open positions for too long.  i.e. you don't want your Trending EA to be activated but your ranging EA to be activated instead.

Hence setting smaller TP will generate search that have more ranging EA and setting larger TP will generate search with more Trending EA (make sure your SL is also matching to these types of EA you are searching for).

Likewise make sure all the rest of your acceptance criteria are compatible to your TP, SL based on the types of EA you are searching for.  Eg Trending EA tend to have low win/loss ratio and scalper need to have higher win/loss ratio.  Trending EA has higher risk/reward whereas scalper has lower risk/reward ratio etc

In conclusion, if you are looking for ways to improve your quality of search with EA Studio, based on your initial SL and TP settings, I will definitely suggest you make some changes to the TP, SL range you are currently using (TP 10 - 2000, SL 10 -200 pips)

Ok I hope these tips help you out in choosing your EA Studio settings/acceptance criteria etc carefully and knowing how to use these settings lies in understanding the characteristics of EA you intend to build/search.

Wishing you the very best in your EA development journey

Cheers
Hannah

Re: Hannah's Trade/Portfolio Management Tips

Thanks a lot for your help and constuctive answer Hannah!

Ok i will setup per pair which strategy the system should search for: ranging or trending and then
determine which piprange SL and TP will be best based on daily average range for say the last 30 days.

Thanks again stupid i overlooked this but the system can look this way much more selective, especially
with my poor 4 core cpu. Best investment in time will be a  pc with a 3990x core with 64 cores i suppose.

I saw your posting regarding ea monitor from forextoolshed but unfortunately their website is down and
naturally cannot download it via webarchive (only see their old site content). Would appreciate it a lot if someone has somewhere the exe file somewhere. Would be great to use that for risk management since i'm finding a way to set per example
max risk (+ open float) per EA per week whereafter it closes any open trades for that EA and pauze trading for it the rest of the week. Further as well a % where after that metatrader account closes all positions and stop trading for the week.

Further i'm checking if  EA management can be automated. Issue only that metatrader runs on windows and mysql on linux (for programming) but maybe with wine can extract some things. Most ideal would be to upload a lot of EA's to a system and let programming handle it. Where i mean: in the ea you could set a variable like net profit / max drawdown and then let the programming shift the best EA's from more worse so in the end depending on the rules set (DD etc) you can easily upload 1000's of ea's and handle much more then doing these things manually (kinda a much more advanced version from the portfolio manager but then more an EA manager) At this moment i just select which appear the best 5 strategies the reactor generates from that pair but moving it to MT4 takes al of time where ideally it would be with just a click in the Expert Advisor Studio. Could be nice to just use 50 of them and let the ACTUAL forward testing determine what EA is best fort hat timeframe/pair.
Last years i spend 1000's of hours of QA with node.js and ctrader with fix but issue was that backward testing was totally different then forward testing in results (wish i came/found forexsb earlier hehe )

I am wondering if anyone already found something like this or worked on this since i prefer not to reinvent the wheel.


Thanks,

Peter

79 (edited by hannahis 2020-05-17 13:17:50)

Re: Hannah's Trade/Portfolio Management Tips

Hi JO2,

Sorry can't send exe file over the forum, I've the EA manager set up file.

You can also explore Fxblue P/L Manager https://www.fxblue.com/appstore/6/pl-manager

80 (edited by hannahis 2020-05-29 13:19:59)

Re: Hannah's Trade/Portfolio Management Tips

A) How to Remove Strategy from Portfolio Expert

B) How to Select a single Strategy from Portfolio Expert and view it in EA Studio

C) How to view my Strategies from my Portfolio Expert

D) How to Combine Strategies from 2 different Portfolio Expert into 1 Portfolio Expert


A) Remove Strategy from Portfolio (if you know the magic number)

1. Open the Portfolio Expert via the Meta Editor (in your MT4 terminal)

2. Scroll down to line 629 and you will see the following codes below

void SetSignals(Signal &signalList[])
  {
   int i=0;
   ArrayResize(signalList,2*strategiesCount);
   HideTestIndicators(true);

3. Look for the strategy/magic number you want to remove from the Portfolio Expert and delete those lines and leave the rest intact.

4. Once you have deleted those strategies you don't want, you can save and compile the file. 


So if you have 10 Strategies and you only want to remove magic number 03, look for the codes for strategy 03 and delete those lines.  You will then have 9 strategy left.

This method will retain your original Magic numbering system.  Good for those who want to continue to track the performance of your EA in demo accounts.

B) How to Select a Single strategy from a Portfolio Expert and view it in EA Studio

1. Repeat the steps for (A) How to remove strategies from Portfolio Expert.  This time you delete all the strategies(from 00 to 99 but keep only the Strategy number you want, eg 03)

2. Save and compile the file

3. Go to EA Studio, Under the Tab "Strategy" go to the scroll down menu and choose "Import an Expert Advisor back"

4. Click "Expert Advisor" to download the same Strategy as MT4 file.

You will be able to see your strategy's details from here and make any necessary changes etc.


C) How to View the Strategies from a Portfolio Expert in EA Studio

1. Use a Validator and make sure you use the same data set you use to generate this strategy (in Historical data)

2. turn off all other features such as Acceptance Criteria and Remove "Resolve Corelationships automatically in the Collection tab

3. Check for the number of EA Calculated and Ascended.  If you have 10 strategies in your Portfolio Expert, you should be able to see 10 being loaded, calculated and ascended.  However if you are not using the same data set, some of your strategies that didn't have any net profit will be automatically deleted.

4. If you faced any problem whereby a particular strategy didn't get ascended, then you may have to save your strategies one by one using Method B (as mentioned above, Select a Single Strategy from Portfolio Expert) and Import each Expert Advisor Back one by one into your collection.

If you only have a few strategies, this method is bearable but if you have a lot of strategies, this method would be tiresome to do.

Furthermore, once you use the Validator method to bring back your Strategies into the EA Studio's Collection, bear in mind that the magic number  may have changed in the process.  Your original 1st strategy number 00 may not be the same number anymore.

When you export your strategies as Portfolio Expert (you lose the original magic numbering system) and hence this method is not suitable if you want to continue to track your EA's demo account performance.

D) How to Combine Strategies from 2 different Portfolio Expert into 1 Portfolio Expert

1. Method A to remove those strategies you don't want from each Portfolio Expert.

2. Import your strategies back either using the Validator, as mentioned in (C) or if you have individual strategy extracted from the Portfolio Expert, you can import it back via "Import an Expert Advisor back" as mentioned in (B). 

3. Each time your import an Expert Advisor back, remember to add that strategy into the Portfolio (the button next to download "Expert Advisor" (MT4 or MT5 version).  Because if your strategy somehow didn't pass the validator due to negative net profit, it will not be shown in the collection folder and you need to add in to the Portfolio folder. 

4.  Download all your imported and selected strategies (from 2 separated Portfolio Expert, via Validator/import an Expert Advisor back) from the Portfolio Folder and go to Portfolio Content page to download them as Collection file.  so you have both the Portfolio Expert (MT4 file) and the Collection file.

Likewise, the magic numbering system will be totally different from your original magic numbers, hence this method is good to start afresh in your demo testing but not when you need to continue tracking your strategies live/demo performance.

Re: Hannah's Trade/Portfolio Management Tips

Thank you for above explanation, great work and fantastic you share this information which prevents me from
trying to reinvent the wheel over and over or just see a couple of wheels which i did not see and doing ineffective
things for hours which can be done in 5 minutes work as well at the moment someone (you) explain where to find
the wheels to let the car rolling.

Stupidly i just found the youtube movie about how the portolio
expert generator works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vEy91gvr1PE
mine option was greyed out so i thought it was an extra option but had to simply click recalculate.

Thank you for your great advise!