EAs online

[shadowninja]

Why is it that when I try one of the EAs available on the main website, the results are nowhere near the ones the coder displays in the description?

 

[Trader333]

It is known as curve fitted backtesting which can always give great results with hindsight. A good analogy would be for me to let you know what the lottery numbers are for Saturday on Sunday morning


Paul

 

[shadowninja]

Why do it, though? These EAs are free, so once someone downloads it to find it doesn't work, they'll just move on.

 

[Trader333]

I am unable to answer what motivates them to do it because I am not one of them. I am trying to explain the likely reason why real time results do not match historical.


Paul

 

[kako]

Paul

It's a flaw in MT4's backtesting which makes all this confusion. It certainly can not open and close a trade on the same candle and this makes numerous problems specially in short term trading(which in fx is always the case!).
apart from that, there are modeling issues too, there are several ways of modeling candles in Backtest and all of them give different results and reliability.

All in all, MT4 is not a good software to Backtest at all. It could be recommended for trading, coding, but certainly not backtesting. HTH.

Regards
...........................
Kako

 

[oilfxpro]

Why is it that when I try one of the EAs available on the main website, the results are nowhere near the ones the coder displays in the description?

Hi

What main website?

There are several reasons.

Firstly a lot of coders do not want people to use their work for free.So they change the optimised settings to some non-profitable settings.It is usually a case of contact coder pay some money to coder.

Commercialy sold EAS are hyped and ramped up to look superior pieces of expert advisors.They are highly optimised on backtests to some unreal world and settings , the purpose of optimisation is to dupe the buyer into believing the expert advisor's hyped performance.

After purchase the buyer trades it in a real world and true market conditions.The back tests did not take account of overnight carry costs and spread increases during periods of high volatility.In real trading the system gets hit for higher spreads by brokers.

Most expert advisors come on the market after a period of favourable market conditions for the expert advisor,so backtests will look good for a short period of time until market conditions change

All the scammers come shouting "my expert advisor made some many pips" after favourable market conditions, but they keep quiet when they are losing money

OILFXPRO

 

[shadowninja]

Ah, fair point.

I am unable to answer what motivates them to do it because I am not one of them. I am trying to explain the likely reason why real time results do not match historical.

Sorry didn't mean to make it look like I was pointing a finger at you.