Algorithmic Trading & Forex Robots

32 Responses to “Algorithmic Trading & Forex Robots”

June 19, 2015 at 9:32 am, Alim Bangura said:

Hit the nail on the head again Kirill! Algorithmic trading systems provide traders with more freedom, less psychological burdens and improved execution. Algorithmic trading systems also enable traders to improve their systems through optimization and performance analysis. Thanks for the post!

June 19, 2015 at 12:06 pm, Kirill said:

Completely with you on that one!

September 01, 2015 at 3:14 pm, Blaird52 said:

Hi Kirill….keep them coming they are awesome…..i have a new found confidence and direction, and intend to learn the “Algo ” stuff…to complement , then hopefully use them to take over from day trading.

Thanks you ROCK..!!

September 01, 2015 at 11:20 pm, Kirill said:

Thanks Blaird, that’s awesome to hear! Good luck with your forex journey and I look forward to seeing more of your comments on forexboat! Kirill

October 17, 2015 at 1:27 am, Rene Patrique said:

@ Blaird52 – I can honestly HIGHLY recommend ALL of Kirill’s Udemy courses (yes – I took them all) !! – They had a HUGE impact on my learning curve, sloping it simply UP !! – Is it work to do the courses? – Yes it is. – But is it worth it? – Absolutely! – GO FOR IT – you won’t regret it … – Now that is a PROMISE! – Cheers from Germany! – 🙂

November 17, 2015 at 11:13 pm, Stefan Buchholz said:

Hi Rene,
woher kriegst du deine robots? Programmierst du alles selber? Grüße aus Düsseldorf

November 18, 2015 at 7:28 am, Rene Patrique said:

Guten Morgen Stefan,
mein FX-Robot-Portfolio ist ein Mix aus selbst programmierten + gekauften EA’s und dazu welche die ich in Programmierkursen und als Gegenleistung für Beta-Tests von neuen EA’s bei diversen Entwickler-Teams abstauben konnte, die ich also nicht selbst entwickelt habe. – Wenn Du Interesse an einem günstigen EA-Paket hast, schick mir bitte eine eMail (findest Du im Impressum meiner Webseite). Bin allerdings heute im Aufbruch nach Frankfurt (“World of Trading” Messe) und erst Sonntag wieder zu Hause – wirst Dich diesbzgl. also ein bischen gedulden müssen. – Bist Du der Linux-User, den man auch googlen kann? – 🙂
Grüße aus Gladbeck
Rene

November 18, 2015 at 7:33 am, Stefan Buchholz said:

Hi René,
ich freue mich sehr dass du geantwortet hast. Meine E-Mail ist stef.Buchholz aht googlemail usw…
Ich bin ganz neu in dieser Welt und finde mich noch nicht so zurecht, da doch sehr viele Meinungen gerade über robots vorherrschen. Wurde mich freuen wenn wir uns über E-Mail etwas austauschen könnten. Ich wünsche dir viel Spass auf der Messe.
Liebe grüße aus Düsseldorf

November 18, 2015 at 7:37 am, Rene Patrique said:

Hey Stefan, wenn ich mich nicht vertippt habe, dann solltest Du jetzt eine eMail von mir im Postfach haben. – Ist die angekommen? – 🙂 – Cheers!

October 13, 2015 at 12:25 pm, Rico said:

I finally got caught up on these videos. Fantastic, Kirill, against the grain of what much current advice is, but supported by your results and reasoning. Thanks for the insight and inspiration your story provides in the the first two videos, showing us your setup, and this very nice explanation of algo trading. I’m going to let other people know what a fantastic resource Forex Boat is,

October 13, 2015 at 11:44 pm, Kirill said:

Hi Rico, Thank you for the great comments! Looking forward to seeing you more on ForexBoat. Cheers, Kirill

October 17, 2015 at 1:18 am, Rene Patrique said:

Wow Kirill! – 🙂

When I took all your Udemy courses on programming EA’s I already mentioned that I think that heaven sent you my way – at least something like this sort. – This video (and your honesty about “Get rich quick” assumptions and “scams” out there) shows me once more that I have a “real deal” mentor found in you! – If I would be more religious I bet I would enclose you in my prayers and ask God to protect you from all bad stuff – as I am not THAT religious I just feel SO LUCKY to know who you are and what you have to give! – Let me add this: You’ve mentioned you drive a motor-cycle – let me say it this way: “PLEASE, always drive with CARE!” – Seriously! – I hope I do not sound like your mom here … – LOL – ;D

I’ve got some questions about the last account statement (that one with the withdrawals): You mentioned that this account was traded by a “Portfolio” of Forex-Robots – now, I am interested in how you backtest a portfolio, since this is not supported in MetaTrader4 …

Having drawdowns in mind: Do you analyze your “Risk of Ruin” and size your positions accordingly to a “Risk of Ruin” of ZERO and then compound the drawdowns of the individual strategies that sum up (or down in case of a drawdown *giggles*) in your portfolio with an eye on your account size to trade as “safe” as the math behind it can possibly make it? – Do you maybe use the “CAR 25” concept of Dr. Howard Bandy and his “Safe f” position sizing model to go relatively safe? – Or is the “Half Kelly” approach from your Money-Management-Course on Udemy exactly what you trade? – What’s your approach on building a portfolio and how do you backtest it?

Other questions: Do you take care that you have various strategies in one and the same portfolio (like a trend-following one, then one counter-trend strategy, then one break-out strategy, then one … and so on and so forth) to give the portfolio a maximum variety in diversification? – Do you maybe turn off a specific EA once in a while because the market has changed and it’s maybe not the right one for the actual conditions of the market? – What’s your approach on diversification?

I’d be more than happy if you could help me understand better how to succesfully combine different EA’s into a portfolio. – Sorry for the large number of questions here – but I am biting off my fingernails right now here, because I have all these questions in mind. – To get answers from you would really make me happy (… and my nails, too) !! – 🙂

Thank you in advance for each and every answer you’re willing to send my way!

All the best from Germany
René

🙂

October 19, 2015 at 10:49 am, Kirill said:

Wow Rene! I could create a whole new course just by answering your questions 🙂

Anyway, let’s give it a go:

Portfolio – this is perhaps the most creative part of my trading. There is no set rule that I follow such as the Risk of Ruin or CAR 25 that you mentioned. I assess each of the strategies separately and based on their individual performance I determine which ones I want to weigh more and which ones – less. Next a table is created with the proposed weighting coefficients for the strategies. Next I check which ones operate on the same currency pairs (this implies increased correlation) and normally their weights are reduced in order to avoid high drawdowns. Alternatively, if there are too many strategies on one currency pair, I will remove the weaker ones. Once all of this is done a total lot size is identified based on the worst-case scenario i.e. if all or at least ~80% of robots experience losses at the same time. This lot has to be such that it satisfies my max drawdown requirements for the account in question. Once that is determined this lot is distributed across the portfolio proportionately to the weighting coefficients. As you see, it is quite a straightforward process.

Different strategies in one portfolio – this is a good thing. The more diversification you can achieve – the better. Also, currency diversification can be beneficial too.

Turning off EAs – this is normal. Sometimes even one EA might be running on 2 charts with different sets (e.g. Day set and Night set – since markets move differently). If one of the sets is underperforming it gets discontinued and replaced with an update or a totally different set.

Hope I’ve satisfied your curiosity…. and saved your nails 😉

By the way, thanks a lot for the great comments! I’m glad you are enjoying the knowledge I can share. You’re, hands down, the student that has stuck around for the longest period I can remember. Keep it up 😀

Cheers from Brisbane,
Kirill

October 19, 2015 at 2:02 pm, Rene Patrique said:

“Wow Rene! I could create a whole new course just by answering your questions :)”

I’m flattered! – 🙂 – Go for it, Kirill! – I would immediately enroll in your “Portfolio” course!

“total lot size” – So you prefer to meet your objectives in terms of max. drawdown to determine your total lot before distributing it across the portfolio proportionately to the weighting coefficients you gathered for the account in question, and this solely based on backtests in case you’re setting it up for the first time, like I would do it (first time) in my case? That sounds like a “best estimate” in the first run, is it? – Correct?

“underperforming” – Where do you see the critical barrier to detect a set is actually underperforming, please? Do you have kind of a “safety buffer” so your drawdown does not shoot over your total drawdown objectives – something like “If 80% of the drawdown is trespassed (Pareto comes into play! ;)) sets get discontinued or replaced.” – Or do you really wait for the max. drawdown to be reached at full capacity (100%) with the risk of overshooting (going up to 105% or more) ?!

“too many strategies on one currency pair” – I guess how much strategies are actually “too many strategies” depends on the lot size determined in your correlation table, right? – Is the sum of individual drawdowns the criteria here, or does an absolute number of strategies do the job (like “max. 4 strategies on one currency pair”)? – Or is there an “exclusion criterium” at work (like “if the strategy performs less than 50% of profits it had in the backtests, it will be considered to be a weak one”)?

“diversification” – Got ya! – 🙂

“Turning off EA’s” – How about seperate set files for “Short only” and “Long only” trades? – In backtesting, I experienced that depending on the trend of the market (bear or bull) often it is more efficient to have exclusive sets for “short” and for “long” trading with different parameters for trend detection and position size (i.e. MA periods, lots, etc.). – Did you experience that as well, and do you make use of it? – Or do you always just have one set for short and long trades alltogether, trading the same lot size in both directions?

“Hope I’ve satisfied your curiosity…. and saved your nails ;)”

The good thing about fingernails is they do grow – ;D – I know it’s not the most attractive habit to bite them off when getting too excited. – Gotta work on that one! – 😉

“By the way, thanks a lot for the great comments! I’m glad you are enjoying the knowledge I can share.”

Words can’t tell how much I appreciate your mentorship, Kirill! – 🙂

“You’re, hands down, the student that has stuck around for the longest period I can remember. Keep it up :D”

You bet! – 🙂 – Even if I would have “made it” already, be sure I’ll never forget how important all your input was (and still is!) for my journey into Forex!

Seriously: If you EVER want to come to visit Germany then I would be honoured to have you as my guest and to be your guide over here!

Hoping those requests here aren’t redundant (in case I didn’t get a thing right from your first answers) – and that this little “porfolio” discussion here maybe really inspires you to set up a course specifically on “portfolio trading with EA’s” on Udemy!

Can’t await to get helpful answers on my requests (although my nails did vanish into thin air already – a good time to start to work on that bad habit, I guess). – ;D

Thank you SO much, Kirill!

Cheers
René

October 21, 2015 at 6:51 am, Kirill said:

Hi Rene,

total lot size – you summed it up quite well. However, note that the advice I provide is always of a general nature and I cannot recommend what will be best for you in your personal circumstances and for your financial objectives and needs. (I had to say that – regulatory requirement 🙂 )

underperforming – I don’t wait until the drawdown is reached. You generally can tell that the EA has gone off track. For example, when it has a higher % of loss trades than it should according to the backtest. Usually, this is a good sign that market conditions have changed. OR that the backtest was unreliable’

too many strategies – there are different ways to determine this. One could be when there are so many that you are physically getting lost in your MT4. Another would be when you don’t have enough time to maintain them all and the return on the time you do spend is not worth it. Finally, when you have so many strategies that your lot are spread too thin across all of them or when you cannot divide your lot any further. E.g. most brokers have a min lot of 0.01 – you cannot divide that any further.

short and long separate – great thinking! Back in the day it took me several years to arrive at this conclusion: EAs generally have higher potential when they are NOT symmetrical. Buy-Sell assymetry can be achieved by either having separate EAs for the separate directions or by coding your EA in an assymetrical way – same thing, just different implementations

Hope I didn’t miss anything! Good luck with your learning curve.

BTW, Germany – I’ll take you up on your offer. I might be somewhere that way next year and will drop you a note then!

Cheers,
Kirill

October 21, 2015 at 4:41 pm, Rene Patrique said:

Hey Kirill,

thanx again for anwering my questions! – Here are my thoughts – and some follow-up questions again (gotta catch opportunities, right?):

“regulatory requirement” – Sure. – 🙂 – Let me say it this way: “You’re a bloody professional, Kirill!”- 😉 – Love it!

“underperforming” – Got ya!

“too many strategies” – Got ya!

“market conditions” – Most people say there are only three (bull, bear, sideways), others (e.g. Van Tharp) say there are six (up-quiet, up-volatile, down-quiet, down-volatile, flat-quiet, flat-volatile). In conclusion, a data sample needs to have at least 100 Trades from EACH of the conditions to deliver statistical significant results in backtesting. – Dou you agree?

“asymmetrical trading” – I’m flattered again! – 😉 – How about the workload i.e. a VPS has to manage: Isn’t it even an advantage to code EA’s asymmetrical because one can trade seperate long and short parameters on the same chart? – Am I right here?

“Germany” – It would be my absolute pleasure to meet you in person here in my hometown, Kirill! – 🙂 – I live in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gladbeck – so when planning your tour do make sure to include a visit over here!

Cheers,
Rene

November 12, 2015 at 3:03 pm, Alan said:

Kirill, Thank you for yet another great video. I have taken both of your courses mentioned above. They are the best I have seen on the subjects. Both have helped my trading. Coding the Expert Advisor (EA) is a great way for me to write my trading rules down. Using the EA in backtesting, I can test the validity of my rules. I can do years of manual trade testing simulation in minutes. It has taken me less than a year to become functional in writing Expert Advisor code. It was well worth the time. I better understand the “math” of what I am doing. I do not like the emotional strain of guessing if a strategy might work. Your courses have helped me to turn a guess into a probability.

November 12, 2015 at 10:55 pm, Kirill said:

Hi Alan, that’s great to hear! I’m glad you see eye-to-eye with me. Good luck in your trading!

January 07, 2016 at 10:23 am, Ted Luik said:

Hi Kiril

Your videos
make good sense for Robot trading – but I am not inclined to attempt to learn
programming. However years ago I was skilled in drawing Decision flow charts.

My questions
:-

1/ there
are a few Expert Advisor Builder systems – which are graphical / flow chart
based and supposed to be easy to learn and generate the programming code – what
do you think of them and any thoughts which ones are OK?

2/ Initially
I am thinking of simple robots to alert me when market conditions (e.g. crossover
of MA’s) occurs so I can then check chart and decide whether to manually trade –
what do you think? Easier to program? (later I would fully automate trading)

Your course
on optimising and back testing looks good – so that’s the one I would want to
help me progress to fully automated trading. Also maybe enable me to test any “proprietary”
robots that I might buy particularly during any “free trial” / “money back”
time period?

January 16, 2016 at 9:25 pm, Eric LeBouthillier said:

Thanks Kirill , i think exactly like you robots works 24/5 , no emotion at all, and they do exactly your logic to tell them to do. I did hired a programmer to create some robots for me let’s see how it goes 🙂

cheers from Canada

January 17, 2016 at 5:15 am, Kirill said:

Awesome Eric! Glad you agree. Good luck and enjoy the tutorials.

Kirill

February 15, 2016 at 2:46 pm, Archie09 said:

Hi Kirill! First of all, thank you very much for all your great FX videos – I signed up for almost all your courses on Udemy as well. Keep up the great work!

Wanted to ask you one thing:

when “feeding” the test data to your robots do you use only minute quotes or “tick”/volume info as well? How important is the latter to your portfolio strategy?

cheers!

March 22, 2016 at 9:44 am, Kirill said:

Hi Archie,

MT4 uses minute data and models tick movements in the tester. This is sufficient for some types of EAs.

If you are testing scalping strategies, then it might be a good idea to switch to raw tick data. The best tool for this I know of is called TDS. Here is my affiliate link: forexboat.com/tds

Kirill

March 23, 2016 at 8:43 am, Archie09 said:

Thank you for the response, Kirill! How does TDS compare to ForexTester? These are essentially same instruments, right?

March 24, 2016 at 1:12 pm, Kirill said:

These are completely opposite instruments 🙂 ForexTester allows you to manually test trading strategies. TDS is a sophisticated tool to enhance your backtesting and optimization. Hope this helps

February 29, 2016 at 8:56 am, Sulaimon said:

Hi Krill,

I have been practicing on demo account for over 2 months now and i have just signed up for live trading.

I am confused about the strategy back testing result to use and hope you can help please.

I have tested my strategy on different time period( 1, 2, 3 ,6 months and 1 year) each giving me different result and entry time.

Please which period result is best to use? is it the last month or 3 months or 6 months optimizing result?

Best regards

Sulaimon

May 12, 2016 at 6:55 pm, Charles said:

Hi Kirill, This is really great stuff! Thank you for dropping all of this knowledge here and on your Udemy Courses. Your material is very high quality all around. I have a comment and a question I wanted to ask you:
1) Comment: What I like about your courses is that you don’t have material only for beginners trying to learn MQL4 but also for people who are a bit more advanced and want to keep growing their skills to manage their EAs and tests. If you have more advanced knowledge (such as suggested in other comments in this thread about managing EAs at scale), it would be wonderful to hear more about it. In any case, thank you so much and keep up the great work!
2) Question: Do you trade at all for other people? Do you give investors a chance to participate in your trading signals (i.e. set up some sort of “hedge fund”)? If not, why not?

Thanks a lot for everything! I have learned so much thanks to you.
Cheers,

Charles

May 13, 2016 at 2:07 am, Kirill said:

Hi Charles,

Thank you for the great comments!

Answering your question, I don’t manage investments for others nor do I provide signals because this would constitute investment advice and in Australia you require a special license for that.

I look forward to seeing you more inside the courses!

Kirill

July 16, 2016 at 3:35 am, Boon said:

Hi Kirill, thanks for re-sending this video training to us. As reply to your question on the email about like/ hate the Algo trading:

I like the Algo trading is because it help to get rid of our emotion of “fear and greed” which will affect our trading decision / results. Also, let us have more time to do other things in our life instead of sit in front of the computer to monitor our trading all the time. Hate it when it is become “unstable”, not function as what we expect because of the market condition keep changing. We need to retest and reset it to suit the new market condition. Also, the testing procedure is tedious when the EA has a lot of parameters, not easy to find the best combination of parameters when the test results are more than few hundred thousand of lines.

July 16, 2016 at 4:08 am, Kirill said:

Hi Boon,

Thanks for your comments! All make sense.

In regards to testing, consider this – you don’t have to find the BEST parameters. Good enough often works too.

Kirill

July 16, 2016 at 6:54 am, Boon said:

Hi Kirill, thanks for the advice, will adopt your suggestion, maybe this can help to reduce the testing period.

August 14, 2016 at 8:23 pm, Ajay Patel said:

I love your Honesty and not being just a salesman as other trading coaches.who makes videos just to sell their courses not to teach. I gone through all of yours courses except Forex robots and planning to go for it now.
Well just want your opinion i started with demo account then make a lot of money it was just a coincidence i did it all even without proper knowledge.and later on my account wiped off. Then i start with the real money first day deposit 100$ then loose 2nd day i feel it was too low to manage the margin so i deposit 500$ again and within few hours i again loose all and only 9$ left. until that time i was not aware of lot sizes and make lot of mistakes once i loose all i was very disappointed then cool down myself and decided to learn learn and learn.
Then i come across your course A-Z then i realise where did i make mistakes why i loose all money. I started again with a demo and attended training of a-Z MT4 Money Management.
Before i start with the real money again i am really wanna be dam sure that i can protect my capital and never let the margin call to happen in life.

Well my question is should i expert myself with manual first before go for robots as i am a beginner still not good in strategies.
OR i can start focusing on Robots after all these courses. I think coding would not be a problem for me i can learn it soon as i am very much interested in those things.

What do you think please advice me your opinion as i do trust on you.

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