Disliked{quote} The Profit Factor alone is not so important. The most important thing for any strategy is the absolute size of the edge in relation to the friction cost. You can have very robust strategy even with profit factor 1.1 if the expectancy per trade is multiple times the friction cost. You can also have a strategy with very high profit factor like 3+ and it is still a bad strategy. For example most martingale and grid systems tend to have very high Profit Factor until they crash. We all know these strategies are garbage in the long run but short...Ignored
Totally agree with you about the life span of strategies can be short, otherwise everyone would be millionaires with a single EA.
My first strategy is also giving 52-55% win rate with 1.1R. But my approach is not to further optimize it after trying for a week. I found a lot of strategies work only on a few pairs, or within a period of time. I only have 1yr of data to backtest. My thought is if it is CONSISTENTLY profiting last year, i.e. Mostly green months and only one to two flat/red months, it is likely to work at least a few months into the future. I just keep my greed, and stick with the basic. I also dont have the psychology to trade with discipline for now so I learned to write EAs.
In the process I learn a lot about indicators and market interpretation also MQL4 coding
I then move on with a bit more knowledge, and start developing another strategy. Base on my skill level I try to look for a strategy in ANOTHER approach. In my case my first is trend following, so I looked for reversals. Again found a strategy that look profitable, backtest to prove it profitable, forward test a month in demo, then just put it on live.
Repeat the process. Now I am into third and forth strategies. I know more about indicators, so my third is based on volume and oscillators, forth is Renko and momentum.
Just my opinion from my experience.
1. If optimization is not done in a few tries, then just move on before you curve fit. An EA giving you 2-3%/ mth is not bad at all.
2. Have both demo and live acc, test ur strategies on Demo before proceeding to Live. If a strategy has continuous DD over long time (still figuring out how long), put it back to Demo to see if its time is gone
3. Learn coding if you go for EA. I learn both PineScript on TradingView and MQL4. Pinescript is easier for strategy manual backtesting and MQL4 if really go for EA.
4. Start with very basic things. Maybe MAs, then RSI, then Price Action, Oscillators, chart types, etc. along the way you learn very well the function of each indicators, you may also learn how to code them into your EAs!
But congratulation for starting with a winning strategy
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