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Petko AleksandrovAlgo trading courses: this is what we do and today we will answer the top FAQ from our London, NY & Tokyo trading systems
Hello, dear traders, and welcome to the top 10 frequently asked questions for the Algorithmic trading course London, New York, and Tokyo system. So in this article, I will answer the most frequently asked questions that I receive for this course and for all of our Algo trading courses. And I will give you some more details and explanations about the course.
1. “Why should we avoid to download historical data from the history center in MT?”
That is a great question because as we show in all of our algo trading courses, the Historical data is super important. Now, in the history center that we have in the Meta Trader platform, the historical data comes from the MetaQuotes Company, and actually there comes a pop-up message if you try to download the historical data and it says that this data will be from MetaQuotes.
So this is not the data from your broker and we really want to avoid using different historical data from our broker. The idea in algorithmic trading especially when we create Expert Advisors, when we generate them, and when we backtest them, is to do this over the historical data of our broker that we will use for real trading.
Simply, it’s because the different brokers provide different prices every day which forms different historical data.
It could be a very tiny difference between the prices of the different brokers but it impacts the backtesting result. So it is very important to use the historical data from your broker.
2. “What do we do if we already downloaded the data from the history center?”
Now, this question is logical after the first one and the answer is very simple, you will need to reinstall the Meta Trader and start from the beginning. So once you have downloaded the historical data from the history center, you need to reinstall the Meta Trader because already you have the historical data from the MetaQuotes.
And even if you do what I show in my algo trading courses pressing the HOME key and exporting it with the script, it will be over the data you have already downloaded from the MetaQuotes Company. So you just need to delete everything, install the Meta Trader, actually it’s not really a hard process.
It takes no more than 15 to 20 minutes to do the whole thing so just do it again. But you will be sure this way you are trading the proper historical data.
3. “I failed to generate strategies as I learned from the other algo trading courses with the trading session hours, why is that?”
Now, first of all, probably this happens if the user has placed too strict Acceptance criteria in the generator. The Acceptance criteria tool found in the EA Studio. So don’t make the strategies that you’re looking for too imaginary. Look for realistic strategies.
So give it a Profit factor of 1.1, 1.2, win-loss ratio of 0.70, minimum Count of trades, for example, 300 to 400, don’t make it like you are looking for the perfect strategy which does not exist. It is better to have more strategies into your collection when you generate strategies than having no strategies after hours of generation.
Remove the Acceptance criteria to be sure.
So if this is what you are missing, the best way to find out if this is the reason is to simply remove the Acceptance criteria, see if you will have strategies into the collection.
If you do, then you start adding some Acceptance criteria slowly until you find the golden middle, as I say, where you have good strategies and at the same time they are filtered with the Acceptance criteria.
If this is not the reason then probably you have some issue with your historical data, there are some bars missing, or anything in tools that you have placed wrong.
Could be the trading hours, make sure you calculate them well according to your time zone, and actually according to the time zone of your broker because sometimes you will see that your broker will show a different time zone from what is your local time.
So when you’re calculating the London, the New York, or the Tokyo Stock Exchange hours, make sure to calculate them according to the time zone you see on your Meta Trader. It is just above the Market Watch where you see the time zone of the broker.
4. “How do the working minutes impact the outcome of the generator from this course and the other Algo trading courses?”
The outcome is not really connected with the working minutes. The more the generator works, the more strategies you will see. It’s just time. You can set it to work for 6 minutes, you can set it for 1 hour, you can set it for 10 hours which is 600 minutes.
Normally, I show in my algo trading courses that I set it to 10 hours during the night when I’m out, or when I’m sleeping, or when I’m not in front of the computer. Or even when I am here recording the lecture videos, I generate strategies.
I run the generator like all the time because I really want to get more strategies so I have a bigger choice. So probably this answers the question, the more you run the generator, the more strategies you will have, the bigger choice you will have. But it’s not that it will bring you better strategies with time, it will just bring you more strategies with time.
So the more you run the generator the better.
5. “How do I save the historical data bars that are loaded if I reinstall the Meta Trader?”
You can save the historical data bars as HST bars which you can find if you go to file, and then you go to open data folder, and then you go to history, and there you will see the HST files which are stored there.
So just copy those, place them in a folder, and later on, when you install the Meta Trader you can place them back. So simply, from time to time you can download these files and place them in a separate folder where you will store your historical data.
And if something happens with your Meta Trader, you reinstall the windows, you reinstall the Meta Trader itself, you just place them. So do this like every other month or every month if you wish to make sure you will not lose your historical data because it takes time to collect the data and it will be horrible if we lose it.
6. “How often do you make new EAs for this system or any of the others from the algo trading courses?”
Well, as I said already, I generate strategies all the time but personally, to me, this is my work. I do this daily, during the weekends, I do this like all the time. This is my job, this is what I do so I do new Expert Advisors constantly all the time.
I test so many Expert Advisors, I include so many Expert Advisors in my algo trading courses. So I really want to do my best to include good strategies, good Expert Advisors, the robustness to be tested well before actually providing the Expert Advisors in my courses or even if I do it for myself.
I want to trade good Expert Advisors because at the end of the day we’re trading with real money. So we want to make sure that we have good strategies and good Expert Advisors and in order to have those, we need to create new ones all the time. Now, if you do this like your part-time job, as a hobby, just run the generator overnight.
There’s no particular Expert Advisor that will constantly create profits for you.
Run it for 10 hours, leave it there to generate, it will cost you nothing, it’s not time-consuming for you to generate strategies. You just need to set up and run it to generate. You will see how I do it most of my algo trading courses.
On the next day, filter strategies then test them. And this process occurs over and over. But with time I figured out that we need to do this because of market changes, we need to be flexible with the market.
You cannot expect to trade always with 1 single Expert Advisor, which will make you constantly profit. I can tell you that probably 99% of the people that are coming to the Academy, writing me emails, people who are buying Expert Advisors from the market, they hope that they will find this golden Expert Advisor that will make them constantly profits.
Unfortunately, that’s not the reality. If it was, I would give such an Expert Advisor in every course and I would make it easier for everybody. We need to be flexible with the market, create many Expert Advisors daily, test them, and see which one to trade on the live account for the moment.
7. “When we monitor the Expert Advisors in FX Blue, should we put constant recent data range?”
When we are testing the Expert Advisors, if you are testing the Expert Advisors for a longer time like a couple of months, or even years, some people prefer to test the Expert Advisors like for really long and monitor the whole period.
You really can change the recent data. For example, you can monitor the Expert Advisors for the last 2 months and always for the last 2 months. So, for example, if it’s now March, I can do it from the beginning of January, and in April I can do it from the beginning of February, and in May from the beginning of March.
I’m always looking at the last 2 months, how the Expert Advisors performed during the last 2 months. And this is an example. You can do it for the last 1 month, for the last 1 week, it is up to you. In most of my algo trading courses I leave it to the traders at the end how they want to manage the EAs.
The robustness of the EAs
But it’s really a good idea to drag the period behind you because this is what makes it important. We’re looking and we’re concentrating on the recent historical data, the recent market conditions. Not the last 6 months, the last 1 year, even if we are using this long period when we’re generating strategies.
But this is different, we do this because we want to have strategies with many Count of trades. This is what brings the robustness, the essential part of the robustness. With the more Count of trades we have in the strategy, the more it is reliable in the future. But this is to generate the strategy.
To follow the results on FX Blue you can use some period for the recent month or 2.
8. “Why do we set 999999… as a number of bars in chart properties?”
Well, there is the next question together with this one, “I still get different bars for all time frames.” The 999… which I said we place in the properties is just because there is a limitation the first time we install Meta Trader with 65,000 bars.
We want to remove it and that’s why we place just 99999…as much as you can so you don’t have basically any limitations. And then if you reopen it, you will see some random number which comes from somewhere in Meta Trader. I have no idea about that. It’s just a number I think randomly they have selected to put. This is because we never see such a huge number of bars.
So we simply remove the limitation for the number of bars and then we just press the HOME key, we load the maximum historical data as possible, and for timeframes, of course, it is different. For M1, M5, you will see a huge number.
Difference between the higher and the lower timeframes in my algo trading courses
In the beginning, probably it will be somewhere between 70,000 – 80,000 bars. If you keep your Meta Trader open for some time, for a couple of months, it will be up to 200,000, 300,000, 500,000 if you keep it like for a longer time. And with the higher timeframes, like H1, H4, daily chart, you will see just a couple of thousands of bars which is normal.
Because one is 1 minute, the other is 1 day. So this is why there is a difference but it’s not connected to where we place the 999. Simply, there we remove this limitation from the Meta Trader.
9. “In all algo trading courses, you include Expert Advisors but in this one, you did not, why?”
Well, there is a simple reason behind that. With this course, I show the system where we are trading with the specific hours for the trading sessions. And with my time zone, these Expert Advisors would not work with any other time zone.
So if I include the Expert Advisors, they will be working only with the traders in my time zone. This you understand is very limited and it doesn’t make sense to do it. So this is the reason I cannot include the Expert Advisors that I use for this system because of the time zone.
10. “Should we really avoid trading currency pairs only with the dollar?”
Well, this is kind of a mistake for every beginner trader at the beginning. As far as I remember I did this mistake many years ago as well. I was focusing to trade only GBPUSD, EURUSD, USDJPY, USDCAD, AUDUSD. Because obviously these are the major pairs and they have the lowest spread and we want to trade the lowest spread.
The problem is that we put too much exposure to the dollar. And when we have some important news for the dollar, when we have some volatile move there with the dollar, it pressures our account.
And sometimes you will see huge profits, sometimes you will see huge losses and drawdowns if you have only the dollar currencies and if you are trading many Expert Advisors only on currencies with the dollar.
That is why I prefer to diversify the risk of a couple of different currency pairs.
These are the 10 frequently asked questions that I receive for the Algorithmic trading course London, New York, and Tokyo system and for all the other algo trading courses. If you have any other questions, you are very welcome to drop them in our trading forum. Many people are already there sharing their experience which is just great and you are very welcome to do it.
Thank you for reading and always enjoy the trading.
Cheers.
