Forward tesing - update

Today the expert advisor won one trade in forward testing.

Now it should have open a new trade, but the connection is lost to the server. I checked Alpari's server, and it's fine.  Since I intend to trade the strategy on a real account, I should do it with another broker, and make the fine tuning of the setup before. I experienced troubles with different Metatrader brokers in the past, and that's the reason that I will probably work with a non-Metatrader broker company. I tried "MBTrading", and they were fine so far.

What's left before engaging the real account? First, I should insert the state logic into the expert advisor. It means that if the Metatrader shuts down, the expert advisor will be able to recover. Second, I have to continue the forward testing at least for the next week and a half.

In the operational form, the Metatrader will be the signal supplier to manual trading, or for the application that I will have to develop as well, which will be based on the broker's API.

Second bug fix - version 4

On forward testing a bug related to long positions found. I fixed it and checked the performance - it got a little bit better. The new version will be MYP4.

First win

After the bug fix yesterday, the expert advisor traded on a demo acoount two winning trades today. I will continue the forward testing, and compare it to the back test of this week, at the weekend in order to verify that it behaves the same.

First bug fix

Well, I found the annoying bug from Friday night. It was a simple rounding problem. If the takeprofit or stoploss are not rounded, the Metatrader returns an error, which wasn't in back test.

I verified also that the performance didn't change. It shouldn't but we must know it for sure. Since there was a softwrae change, it will be named "MYP3".

The forward testing continues with thta version.

Second version - MYP2

The second round enhancement from the last post was added to the expert advisor. This version will be "MYP2" (The first version is MYP1).  The results are better! The best result in my opinion is profit factor of 1.91, 155 trades, and draw down of 15% with risk of 2% for the first trade, and 3% for the second round. The profit was 11290$.

The number of trades raised in 50%, the profit factor improved.

Let's define risk2 as the second round risk.

Since I am interested in higher profit, I checked the setup with different risks, with the same risks ratio: 

Risk	Risk2	Profit	PF	Trades	Drawdown
2	3	11290	1.91	155	15.10
4	6	31930	1.83	155	30
5	7.5	46142	1.8	155	35.12

The back test short report is available here for the setup of risk=4%, risk2= 6%.

The actual risk of each setup is the sum of the two risks.

MYP2 yields higher profit factor, lower draw down, and much trades compared to MYP1. For example, let's have a look at the results of the setup risk=5%, risk1= 7.5%. It is equal to a risk of 12.5%. The same profit is achieved with the first version (MYP1) with risk of 11%.  The difference is that the drawdown is lower (35% vs. 43%), and the profit factor is higher (1.8 vs. 1.45). 

The conclusion is that MYP2 is better, and it is going to be my main effort right now.

Forward test first problem

I started the expert advisor in real time yesterday, and it missed a trade which exists in back test of that day. Right now I don't know why it happened. Full logging mechanism was embedded, and I am going to understand the problem on Monday morning since the conditions for trade are still relevant. 

I am going to continue developing the strategy in paralel. In order ro enlarge the amount of trades, and the profit of course, I am going to add trades to a successful move. Since the winning trads statistics is excellent (around 82%) it might be a good idea.

Forward test

The expert advisor is being tested, with 5% risk. 

My goal is to verify two things:

1. The statistics of the farward testing is similiar to the back test's.

2. The expert advisor works fine in real-time.

Of course it's a demo account. 

There is another optimization process running in the background, whick should find the best setup for 12% risk. I do that since I intend to trade in the future with that level of risk.