Strategy analysis in MT4

I have got into the habit of entering a code, which defines the trade strategy, in the comments column. When I save a report I can then open a spreadsheet and judge which particular strategy is doing well.

Am I on the right lines here? It seems to work but the spreadsheet picks up the data in a messy way and I have to juggle it to get my results out, if you know what I mean.

Any better ideas? Thanks in advance for your attention.

i understand u r forward testing different strategies and trying to see the results using excel by sorting results based on Comment column.rht??

Then why dont u try different mt4 for different strategy and see reports in mt4 itself!
Demo accounts are not costly
Cheers !

I am trading live, using various strategies and although I like your ingenious idea it would not suit my style of trading, which seems to be quite time consuming. The various strategies I use are all profitable to a greater or lesser extent.

This is a sort of time and motion study so that I scrap those that aren't worthwhile.

Thanks for the reply.

Waiting....

I'm just nipping to the loo and I might have a wash and shave. brb. Please reply.

If your spread sheet is screwing up the data on import, you might try a couple of things -

1) try a different spreadsheet, for example Open Office Calc or Google Spreadsheet to see if they import the data cleaner
2) Write a metatrader script (or have one written) that exports the trade history in a format that your spreadsheet can accept.

hey smikster...... what type of results are you wanting to compare.....

whether comparing 2 , 20 or more systems, my preference is to let an ea make the comparisons and report back.....

it could rank and report systems by any metric imaginable.... results could be segemented by system or by individual pair by system.....

the only limit is creatitivity and code expertise......

i'll post a picture of a simple example later.....h

The way you are doing this is completely OK. This is the way such things are usually done, you are basically putting the same TYPE of data into the same table and giving each row a key to which group it belongs. Intuitively you did the right thing, you have your data in a normalized form that can be used for all types of analysis now.

All complexity that is needed to present this data in a more human readable way has to be done in a completely separate stage. The suggestion to use separate accounts is absolutely contraproductive since it would favor only one sort of analysis over *all* others and thus make 90% of all other things that could be done with the data unnecessarily complicated.

All steps that are needed to extract the information you are looking for have to be implemented in the analysis step (and they have to be implemented only *once*) and i suggest not trying to only use spreadsheets and nothing else. Spreadsheets are a wonderful tool but there is a saying that goes: "if you only have a hammer then all problems start looking like nails". Consider learning the ability to write simple scripts (VBA, Python, etc) to read, tranform, filter and extract and process data and also learn about things like databases, database queries and reports.

Thanks for the replies. I just wondered if I was missing something obvious. The data manupulation is not too arduous in the spreadsheet, just a load of cutting and pasting and tidying columns.

I recommend this, by the way. I got some surprising results. It's never a big enough sample - that is a problem. Another problem I have had is where I part close a trade. The inability to edit the comments field in MT4 is frustrating and the broker server deletes the code I have entered and puts something like "from order #########"

I like the ideas of ea's and database sampling. If I were running a merchant bank then the input time or cost would be worthwhile. Unfortunately I am only small time and so, while I am conversant with the query and macro level database programming it doesn't really add up, yet.