LOL @ 200 foot yacht, a person would need to own an oil company to power one.

MT5 'History' page does not have a column for Magic Number, it has a column for 'comments' that some people use for Magic Number. I should have sent a screen shot and thought of that before I asked you to consider MT5.

I am going to convert some MT5 ea's to MT4 and use a trade copiers for the others so that I can use MT4-Tracker for all.

I use MT5 a lot because it can optimize using more variables than MT4 and it has a far better data resource. (opinion)
Plus it can use the cloud for long optimizations which is an advantage. I have some complex ea's that need a long oprimization and MT4 is not suitable for those.

This thing looks like a real disaster, but there is some good info in here (in MT4 Tracker).

As bad as this thing looks...., there are several strategies that have a very high win percentage with a good number of trades.

I decided to not prune until I have 100 trades for the ones to be pruned. to make sure they are losers.

At first I cleaned out the losers too quickly and I think I may have discarded some that would have turned out to be worthwhile. :

I want to see 100 trades before I get rid of them....

Some of them I already know to be bad, some do not trade at all, some  have traded once in a couple weeks...

So. depending on the time frame I will start to get rid of them perhaps in late August....

That is really hard to say, I know that I got rid of a few that may have been good ones. That was a mistake, I tried to have a perfect portfolio for the first couple weeks.

I am not really suire how long I will keep them.. I have a couple that  are big losers, I may clean those out soon.

At one time I was using MT4 Tracker a couple times a day.. now I use it a couple times a week, I just sort the list and have a look.. and close the program.

We generally forward test for 6 months..., so I guess that is what I will try to do although I am undecided.

Sorry for the crappy answer. lol

Hi sleytus,
I have a little problem:
1. I have tried the first time to prune an EA in a Portfolio Expert Advisor but I get a message that nothing was pruned (see attached screenshot). Can you please check why this is. The corresponding report I will add in the next post.
2. I do not understand how to use the option "Exclude Non-trading strategies" What does this mean?

And here the mq4-file

1. o.k. now I understand how it works.
2. I still do not understand how to use the option "Exclude Non-trading strategies" What does this mean?
thank you for your help

Thank you Blaiserboy, I like how you always try to help and assist in any corner

I appreciate the good word -- it means a lot.  And thanks really goes to Popov.  If it wasn't for his amazing software I'd be taking my dog for more walks instead of writing tools for Forex trading.

Regarding pips -- I understand and will consider it.  But as with everything in life, there are always trade-offs.  I'm not an experienced trader so my perspective may be off, but the problem with using pips is I would no longer be able to compare one strategy with another.  The purpose of the app is to help compare strategies to one another and exclude the poor performers.  Pips have different values depending on currency pair (e.g. EURUSD vs USDJPY, lot size).  So, for example, if you were comparing two strategies -- one that won 10 pips and another that won 50 pips -- you couldn't say which was the better performer.  But, if I had one strategy that won $10 and a second that won $50, it's pretty clear you'd chose the latter.  Also, I like using the Return/DD metric -- I find that better than the the Win Ratio -- and I need to use $ to calculate that.

Regarding timestamps for each trade -- yes, it could be added.  The main trade-off here is it would greatly increase the memory footprint of the app, and the benefit isn't clear to me.  When you have hundreds of EAs, each with dozens of trades, then there is a lot more data to store.  The chart generated by MT4's detailed report uses 'Trade #' along the x-axis -- and that used to frustrate me because I, like you, want to see time along the x-axis.  But for purposes of monitoring a portfolio and making decisions about poor-performers, I don't think it really matters.  I may be wrong -- but I doubt it would change the results.  And since it is simpler to use Trade #'s then I decided to follow in the spirit of MT4's way of doing things.

I appreciate your feedback and comments.  Don't be discouraged if I put a damper on these two.  Popov's software makes Forex much more interesting and opens up more opportunities for developing tools to take advantage of EA portfolios.  I intend to continue adding to MT4 Tracker as new features come to mind or are suggested.  I'm also working on an MT4 indicator to help manage portfolios.  As ideas come to you please feel comfortable to pass them along.

Hi Sleytus,
1. I think there is a little spelling fault in the header
2. I would wish to have the (before and after) balance somewhere written in numbers
See attached picture.
Thank you for this handy tool.

Good eyes -- thanks!!  That will be fixed in the next version.

Regarding BEFORE and AFTER balance -- they are displayed, but in the form of 'Gains' and 'Losses'.   I've attached an image.

This is similar to what I'm seeing -- also using Win Percent of 75.  I also use Return / DD Ratio of 3, which is a bit more strict.  In the end the number of strategies is usually cut in half, roughly...

A while back I bought into your advice to forego Demo accounts and instead use Live micro accounts -- and that is working well for me.  It's real money, but I now have more confidence that as I scale things up then there will be fewer surprises.  Also, since it is a Live account, then I don't want to wait for 25 or 30 or 100 trades to decide whether or not a strategy is a keeper.

The statistics provided by FSB Pro and EA Studio are very complete and provide a strong indication of how a strategy should perform.  Let's say the stats show a particular strategy to be a 80% winner.  But when you put it in a Demo or Live account it loses 3 out of the first 6 trades.  I'd say it is a loser and not worth pursuing because there is some sort of disconnect between the original stats and actual trading.  Certainly, over time, it might recover and perform up to its original expectations -- but since we have so many strategies to work with and because many of them *do* perform up to original expectations, then why spend time with the "late bloomers".

Everything is a trade-off -- for now, I'm erring on the side of pruning early (and possibly losing some late bloomers) in order to build-up portfolios of strategies that *do* perform according to EA Studio's original expectations.

And next week I may totally change my approach.  That's one of the beauties of Popov's software -- it opens up so many paths to explore and no one yet knows which is the best, or even if there is just one best.  I'm thinking as long as I stick with the program and use Popov's software the way he intended then I'm going to end up with profitable strategies -- and the only thing I really have control over is the degree of profitability.

Just wondering, if:

1. I prune a portfolio, do the magic numbers still refer to the original strategies, or are they given new numbers.  I assume they keep their identities otherwise it would be hard to keep track of which are still performing well or badly?

2. If there is only one decent strategy in a porfolio, and I wish to extract it and save it separately (for instance I might want to save it in a collection with a few other good ones of the same currency pair and timeframe, and then make a portfolio out of them), is there a way to do it?  I always save a collection before exporting the portfolio, so I have the strategies, but can I always assume the top strategy is Base + 000 and the next one down is Base +101 etc?   Is there not a chance they might be reordered if the sort criteria has changed?  Presumably the strategies won't recalculate when they are uploaded back into EA studio from a collection?  Any recalculation would possible re-order the strategies.