What's one thing you look for before trusting an EA with real money? - page 2
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Backtest, forward test, like looking at all the stats very very carefully does like 50% of the work. And plus when you test out the demo version of any EA, I keep these settings like have realistic delay ( my case 1ms, as I totally want to use VPS when I am running any EAs), that modelling is super important... and also check out the visual mode, that way you can clearly see how positions are opened with TP and SL levels, that way at least we can understand how logical the strategy is. Rest I think communicating with the developer and checking out all the works and ideas.... vision, experience and such imo.
Do you normally require both before trusting an EA?
Really, everyone should test forward as well─not necessarily for forward profit/loss testing, but just to verify that the Tester compliant code is also compliant with live trading. The Tester can be more forgiving in some ways.
That's a good point. It's easy to become confident after seeing strong Tester results, but a forward test often exposes issues that don't appear during backtesting, especially around execution and order handling.
Do you usually have a minimum forward-testing period before you're comfortable running an EA on a live account, or does it depend on the strategy?
That's a good point. It's easy to become confident after seeing strong Tester results, but a forward test often exposes issues that don't appear during backtesting, especially around execution and order handling.
Do you usually have a minimum forward-testing period before you're comfortable running an EA on a live account, or does it depend on the strategy?
My forward testing is limited to testing programmatic execution of all code in the EA. Therefore, I'm done forward testing after every EA component tests successfully (entries, stops, dynamic exits, timers, position sizing, etc.).
In my case, it depends on the strategy. Obviously, every component tests faster in a scalping EA than in a swing trading EA.
(FYI... I enter simulated spread and simulated slippage into my backtests to increase the accuracy thereof).That's an impressive journey. I think there's a big difference between automating a strategy you've already traded successfully for years and trying to build a strategy around automation alone.
I also agree that simplicity often survives changing market conditions better than overly complex systems.
Out of curiosity, since you've been running your ORB strategy for so long, has automating it changed the overall performance, or has it mainly improved execution and consistency?
Great question. To be precise: it mostly improved my execution and consistency, but it had an interesting indirect effect on overall performance.
Concretely, automation drastically increased my win rate, while lowering my risk/reward ratio — and in the end, that makes me more profitable than trading manually. The reason: by automating it, I can scalp the ORB much more aggressively with an ultra-precise, tick-by-tick trailing stop. In manual trading, that level of management simply doesn't make sense — the screen time needed to chase that kind of gain would be completely disproportionate to the result.
So it's not that the entry logic changed, it's mainly that automation let me exploit an exit management style I could never have sustained manually over time.