Best practices for parameter optimization of gold trading EAs - page 2

[Bruce Fx]

I keep thinking about glenfsl's point about the stop placed off the fill you thought you got. That happened to me on gold last month, entry slipped 31 pips on a news spike and the stop landed way further out than the tester assumed. Backtests never reproduce that.

Now I always add a fixed slippage buffer in the tester before trusting any result. The plateau stuff matters, but garbage execution assumptions will kill you first.

[Chris K.]

Hi Phan,

a lot of good tester advice here already, so just one thing from the user side. All of these checks still run on

history.

What changed most for me was running an EA on a small live account for a few months before putting real size on

it, and only scaling once that held up. I'd keep the settings frozen in that phase, otherwise the clock starts again.

That's also where things show up that no tester setting gives you, like the stops glenfsl and @Bruce Fx described, or a

gap at the open jumping straight past the stop. That one cost me a prop challenge.

Best regards

Chris