DislikedHi Achab,
As someone who has been testing for quite a while now, let me chime in on some of your thoughts.
I demo a 3k account trading .01 lots, so you cant get any more conservative than that. After 3 months my account was up 19%. Last 2 weeks I hit a killer basket that has now brought my equity down to 9%. So lost almost half of profits. This EA has been a shooting star until.... so dont get lulled into a false sense of security by a few good weeks or even a month or 2. By the way I use a profit pct of .30 so I always went for the quick...Ignored
Hi Thorn,
I think so, it's the norm. Unfortunately.
I share here three examples, my oldest tests still running that can help to understand something, for me, at least.
Around two months ago I started some tests, it was before Christmas and even if I know that it's not recommended to trade during holidays, I started the tests also because of that reason: "If the EAs will not blow up the demo account it will be really positive, giving me the evidence of excellence".
Here you are:
Phantom6_01x
The settings were changed after 2 days (Magic numbers 777113 and 100106), it means that we can cosider the last one that consists in:
Bailout=0
Slippage=3
MiniSize=10000
StdSize=100000
GBPUSDidx=0
USDCHFidx=1
EURJPYidx=2
GBPCHFidx=3
CHFJPYidx=4
EURCHFidx=5
ResetHourInterval=8
UserTradingAllowed=1
StopAfterNoTrades=0
UseSmallestLot=0
MaxMarginToUse=0.50000000
ProfitPct=1.50000000
MaxMiniProfit=1000.00000000
MaxStdProfit=10000.00000000
MagicNumber=100106
As you can see, we can't say that it's "so conservative", on the contrary it's quite aggressive, and the results confirm it:
Monthly return: +19.6%
Total return: 44,3132% (+2,215.66 / 5,000.00)
Here you will find the complete live stats: http://www.mt4i.com/users/achab-phantom6_01x/stats.
The second test I share here is different. It started with Phantom6_01a (Magic number 110001) and it run starting from 2010-12-14 up to 2011-01-19, then I changed it with Phantom_AddSix_02a (Magic number 1100012) up to 2011-01-31 and since February the 1st until today the EA's running is Ph_AddSix_02ax_CL_TH_PS_achab (Magic number 1232523).
The performances of this mix are:
Monthly return: +28.0%
Total return: 63,7998% (+3,189.99 / 5,000.00)
Here you will find the complete live stats: http://www.mt4i.com/users/achab-phantom6_01az1/stats.
Phantom6_01a
This EA has blown up the demo account. But I wanted to share also it because it demostrates that it can work properly for long time (6 weeks in this case).
The MMTU is 0.5 and the PP is 1.5: is this the reason why it blow up? Maybe.
But the main point is that it was able to (almost) double the balance, before to loose all the gain and more (actually Total profit/loss: -3,200.54, including the floating P/L).
That's why I am convinced that if anyone will use it in real, he must withdraw the gains every month. Just in this case, this test demostrates no losses.
Here you will find the complete live stats: http://www.mt4i.com/users/achab-Phantom6_01a/stats.
All these tests were completely untouched since the beguinning. The only manual operations were made because the EA had some problem and didn't close some trades (PC frozen for 2 days while I was on holiday); I did it after only some weeks, when I put my attention on them again. One of those opened position is still running. This should be another proof that these EAs are solid, valid; in other words amazing.
Have a good day.
/achab