"Now I am using Trade view to build EA's, I am following Sharks guidelines - Demo only for 3 months"
I just thought I'd touch back on Rick's comment above. As I am sitting down this morning and do my daily quality control review of what my EA's have executed in the last 24 hours, I realise one of the benefits of running an EA in demo mode (and this same benefit applied when I ran my manual strategy for several months just in a spreadsheet before going live) is that I develop a good feel for what the strategy/EA does well and what it doesn't do well (without losing any money in the process), because I manually check through all the trades that should have been were placed vs what was placed and at what price, etc. Checking through so many setups and trades manually helps to eventually see patterns, imo.
The result is that I end up working out some improvements that can be made and put them in place before going live. For example one of the EA's I still have in demo mode regularly closes in profit after the 1st bar, but a certain percentage will then end up closing in a loss after the 2nd bar (I only leave the trades open for 2 bars). I also note that 2/3's of the take profit orders that hit the TP do so during the 1st bar, and the other 1/3 during the 2nd bar. So I have figured out I get a better result if I close the TP order at the close of the 1st bar if it has closed in profit (along with the non TP order, otherwise it stays open because a certain percentage if in loss after 1 bar will end up in profit after the 2nd bar). Its just a 2nd way of taking profit and smoothing the equity curve, and works better for this EA.
Also as a result, I feel in no rush to start trading a new EA live - I prefer to wait until I can see that it is (a) working the way it is supposed to and (b) that it is working well.
Cheers, Sharks
