Term of employment of trade experts
Why does it seem to work trading advisor on starts to make a loss? How long will the Expert Advisor be profitable? What should traders who invested in Expert Advisors do?
These questions plague many, and hardly anyone can answer them with absolute certainty. Profit in the market is achieved by the volatility of the market itself, but that volatility carries losses as well. How do you ride that volatility to achieve consistent profits indefinitely?
The answer lies in the platform itself MetaTrader 4. The platform component is a strategy tester designed for testing EAs. The tester helps not only to test advisors, but also to optimize the parameters of the advisor itself.
Many people call optimization fitting the story. They are right in some respects, yes the optimization gives the best parameters for a specified period of time, but the main thing is to use these parameters correctly. After all, the market does not change dramatically. And if we optimize the Expert Advisor for the last 1-3 days, it is very likely that it will not turn out to be a loss in the coming days.
But the optimization raises several questions
1. Which parameters to optimize;
2. In what interval to carry out optimization.
Let's begin by answering the second question. Optimization interval must be chosen according to the chart interval used by the Expert Advisor. Optimization for the last day on the daily chart and, for example, the minute chart has a very big difference. After all, for the daily chart is 1 bar, and for the minute chart 1,440 bars. Therefore on the 1-minute chart we obtain more or less reliable information, while on the daily chart most likely none.
But you can not optimize even a minute chart on a single day, because on that day some important news can be released, which leads to inadequate price movements.
Usually for minute charts, I use optimization on an interval of three days to a week. When increasing timeframe The optimization interval should be increased taking into account the peculiarities of the trading system.
What parameters to optimize?
All - long and unlikely to make sense.
Any TC has important parametersThe parameters that affect the operation of the system itself. For some it is the indicator parameters, for others it is the time to enter the market. These are the parameters that we have to focus on. There cannot be many parameters, usually there are up to four.
What to do, If the advisor is purchasedand not developed independently? How do you know which parameters are important and which are not? Determining this is quite simple. Change the parameters of the Expert Advisor one by one and run the test. Based on these tests, you will see which parameters have the greatest effect on the EA. Once you have found the variables that have the greatest influence on the behavior of the TS, proceed to optimization.
Open the tester panel:
Open the Expert properties:
Mark the "important" parameters and set the initial value ("start"), the step of parameter change and the final value ("stop"):
After that, check the box "Optimizing"You select the optimization interval and press "Start". The results of the runs can be seen on the tab "Optimization results"There, you choose the most attractive option for you and start testing with the selected parameters. Long, tedious, but what can you do because you want to prolong the profitable "life advisor.
Auto-optimization of the Expert Advisor
Some traders (programmers) have gone further. Why not make the EA optimize itself and choose the best options? There is always a lull in the market, so the Expert Advisor has time to analyze the market situation and select the best parameters for further trading.
The principle of this development is simple: At a specified time, the Expert Advisor runs another window of the terminal, carries out optimization there for a predetermined period of time, also on predetermined parameters. The optimization results are saved in a file. Next, the Expert Advisor analyzes the obtained data and chooses the best parameters of the Expert Advisor. After that these values are assigned to the parameters of the Expert Advisor and continues to trade on the modified parameters.