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Hi Lukey,
During the first couple of hours after the opening of the market, the spreads are very large. As a result the ASK price is much higher than normal causing you to BUY at an inflated price. To keep your EAs from buying during this time go to EA Studio Tools>Settings>Trading_session and set ‘Session open’ to 0200 or greater before creating your EAs. I set mine to 0300.
To keep an existing EA from trading when the spread is high go to the EA Properties after attaching the EA to a price chart and set the Spread to a maximum amount. See the image below. To do this properly first determine the normal spread and then set the spread to something a little higher than normal. This will keep the EA from placing a trade when the spread increases above this level. In the image below I have set the spread to 20 points or 2 pips.
Alan,
Thomas,
Yes, you can scale it up!
What I know about using a common EA on various brokers is that the results will not be the same. Some brokers might show greater stagnation, drawdown, and or overall profit than other brokers. So beware of these possibilities!
The problem with passing the FTMO challenge in the past was balancing the account to have a large enough lot size to pass the challenge within 30 days and keeping the lot size small enough so as not to violate the Max Drawdown. Fortunately, lately, the time period has been eliminated from the challenge and the verification phase. So now you can reduce the lot size to help from violating the Max drawdown while taking longer to pass the challenge/verification phases. However, the problem I see with reducing the lot size is what lot size to use. So what we need is a safety net! And, here it is:
You can set the Min, equity protection to a certain percentage you will allow for the Max Drawdown. Here I have chosen 3% of a $10,000 FTMO account. What this means is that if the account drops by 3% from its initial account balance the open trade will be closed and the EA will be deleted. You will then need to reinstall the EA to make it active again. So how do you know when to reinstall it and keep it from further drawing down your account? You have a few options. You could run the EA on the FTMO demo account and monitor it. When the demo account starts profiting you might restart the EA on the live account. Another option would be to restart the EA on the live account but make the lot size small. Once the account starts to make profit again then you can increase the lot size back to its normal value. And, another option would be to test the EAs on the MetaTrader Strategy Tester to see when the EA starts profiting again and then activate it.
In the Top 10 EA course, Petko uses the last one year of historical data to generate the EAs. When testing the EAs you need to limit the historical data used to the last one year. When I look at your balance line over the approximate last one year I see the EA is generating a nice balance line.
There is still a lot you can do with EA Studio after the Trial period is over. Some of the things you cannot do is to import historical data from your broker so you have to use the premium data. Also, you cannot export EAs or create portfolios. You can however, import some of Petkos EAs and analyze them and you can practice creating strategies. So, as I said, there is a lot of things you can continue to do with EA Studio to continue to evaluate it! So, don’t quite. As you continue to gain experience with EA Studio you will begin to see how valuable of a tool it is. As for not having good experience using Petkos EAs with your own broker, there could be many reasons why you are experiencing this issue. Keep communicating on the Forum to get your issues resolved!
There is always more than one way to collect strategies. Aaronpriest does it one way and I do it another. Both ways work! About using computer resources I run 3 Ea Studio on one machine and 4 on the other. I set the run time to 2880 minutes so they are only running for two days each week. About computer resources, I am using about 50%. If this is a problem you can always run them over the weekend when the markets are closed.
In addition, I have thousands of strategies in collections for each forex pair that it is not really necessary to run EA Studio anymore. However, I still collect them. All that is needed is to load them into the validator, set how much historical data I want to use, set the filters, etc, and let it run. As an example, “I can validate a collection of strategies collected a year ago and find strategies that work in recent market conditions.” I have so many strategies collected when I run the validator I get a lot of correlations (similar strategies). This tells me EA Studio is finding duplicate or very similar strategies. This confirms that I have so many collected strategies I really don’t need to use the Reactor to find new strategies as I have a sufficient quantity to run through the validator to find strategies that work in today’s trading environment.
Jaylon, it would be wise to have two computers available and save all your collections and EA Studio settings on an external hard drive. Also, set up your MetaTrader/MetaTraders with login on both computers. Set it up so you can do the same work from either computer. Computers do crash. This way if something happens you can always keep working. I haven’t had a computer crash in a long time but it pays to be prepared. With two computers it also gives you the ability to collect more strategies without Express Generator. Then think about getting Express Generator.
Jaylon, I’m not trying to talk you out of getting the Express Generator I am just explaining why I cannot justify the cost. However, I would suggest you have computer redundancy before getting Express Generator to protect yourself. Do what you think is right for you!
Personally, I haven’t found the need to get Express Generator. Properly created EAs should work correctly for a few months. So what I do is run 7 instances of EA Studio for two days to collect hundreds of new EAs. I then put them in a file as a collection. The next week I will run 7 more instances of EA Studio for two days and collect more EAs. In one month I have hundreds of collected EAs for 28 forex pairs. Then, at the end of the month, I will choose new EAs from all the collections to trade IF there are some in my portfolio I need to change out. If all EAs in my portfolio are all performing as expected then I will not create new EAs from the collections I gathered from the previous month. So it only takes me a few minutes of time each week to change the 7 EA Studios from one Forex pair to another and restart them. Although Express Generator will collect the EAs faster than EA Studio doesn’t really matter to me as the EA Studios are working in the background and do not require my attention. The only real time spent with EA Studio is at the end of each month when I have to choose which EAs to trade. I would have to spend the same amount of time choosing the EAs from the Express Generator. For these reasons, I cannot justify the expense of purchasing the Express Generator. The only way I could justify the expense is if I was creating new EAs to trade every day. However, this is not my intention. My intention is to monitor/update my trading account once a month and not have to be choosing new EAs every day. To me, the whole idea of using EAs is to automate my trading so I don’t have to be at my computer every day. For these reasons, I see the need for the Express Generator.
Jaylon,
The following are the results of my testing of multiple EA Studio to determine the optimum number of EA Studios to use:
This first chart shows the optimum number of EA Studio running at one time for my Intel i5 pc. The graph shows the optimum number of EA studios to run simultaneously is 3. With 3 EA Studios running at one time the Total collected strategies per minute is 3673. Running more than 3 EA studios at one time actually results in slightly fewer strategies collected per minute and just ends up using more unnecessary processor power.
This first chart shows the optimum number of EA Studio running at one time for my Intel i7 11th gen pc. The graph shows the optimum number of EA studios to run simultaneously is 4. With 4 EA Studios running at one time, the Total number of collected strategies per minute is 10435. Running more than 4 EA studios at one time actually results in slightly fewer strategies collected per minute and again just ends up using more unnecessary processor power.
Jaylon,
You are correct! Trading.com is located in New York and is a registered broker. I was thinking about FXGlory.com. They are offshore and accept U.S. traders. FXGlory.com does not have the FIFO rule. Also, you can hedge as long as the second trade in the opposite direction is placed after 7 minutes from the first trade.
Sorry for the confusion!
*FXGlory.com is not NFA registered.
Hi Lydia,
I know the video shows Petko installing 30 EAs. Just do what he does for the first EA. Yes, the EA has to be used on the EURUSD chart and the H1 time frame.
Note: This EA has not been working for the FTMO Challenge since March 2023 as it has been losing since then. Petko updated the EA in his FTMO course but it too has been losing recently. Petko has not updated the EA recently!
Hi Lydia,
You don’t need to feel overwhelmed, we are here to help. When installing EAs into MT4 or MT5 you do not need to change any settings. The only setting you might want to change is the Lot size.Here is a video to show you how to install the EA.
If you have more questions just ask!
Weird, I agree. I can search NFA Basic for Forex.com and it comes up as registered. However, IG.com does not. No consistency!
Trading.com is an offshore forex broker and accepts U.S. traders. Fortunately, they are regulated by NFA. The good thing about Trading.com is as an offshore broker they do not need to follow the FIFO rule.
It seems U.S. forex brokers are stuck with only providing MT4. It could be because MT5 allows hedging which is not allowed in the U.S.