I’m new here, but thought I’d skip the “Introduce myself” section and jump right in.
First, I’ll give you a bit of background as to how I ended up here:
Two weeks ago I set about comparing the different EA builders on the market. I found 14 of them - from the free to the expensive. After drawing up a table and comparing them side by side as well as watching all their instructional videos I decided that the first one I’d try would be FXDreema.
FXDreema had some great reviews and the EA building interface looked really cool. I also liked the cool visual aids when trying to deal with candles.
At the beginning of this week I decided to read FXDreema’s full set of documentation. In all honesty, it was a bit hard going and by the end I felt I had to dive into the platform for it to really make sense.
On Tuesday I started going through some of the old systems I had on hand that I felt were reputable enough to build into EA’s and easy enough as well.
The first ones I looked at were mainly reliant on support & resistance levels, of which I thought would make it hard going to replicate in an EA. But I’d try anyway.
Then, as luck would have it, an old friend who knew I was about to embark on this journey sent me his own profitable system, one he uses daily that makes about 20 pips and doesn’t have any S&R rules, it’s all based on candle’s and pricing - I figured that it would be pretty easy to code and a great start for me. What a result!
Well, I started using FXDreema on Wednesday (three days ago). I spent a solid 2-3 hours at it and by the end of the night I was addicted, but very frustrated. I couldn’t quite work out how this thing ticked, but had managed to build an EA that worked when I put it in MT4. I was a long way off from completing the system, but it had placed a profitable trade so I was quite happy. After the profitable trade, the EA got confused and did nothing… So I knew I had more work to do.
Here’s where I ended up on day 1:
Thursday I had a wee breakthrough. I was trying to get the EA to realize the first trade had ended and it was time to put a second one on. About 70 versions later (you have to save it to test it in MT4, it’s the only way to see if it’s working - unless someone here knows of another alternative) I finally stumbled on the solution after jumping on their support forum.
After succeeding, my spirits were high and I was able to start work on other parts of the system. And by the end of the day I had an operational EA that still had a few bugs in it, but I was on the right track and could see the potential. I was also feeling a lot more comfortable with how Dreema worked and was starting to enjoy it!
Here’s where I ended up on day 2:
Friday night I was out at a Christmas party, so no progress on the EA front.
Saturday morning (today), hungover, and feeling like death… I picked myself up wanting to make this thing work and get it profitable.
I was making swift progress and after an hour I felt I was there. I thought I’d added all the components to the system and it should be hitting the 80% win rate my friend had been preaching about. However, after reviewing the trades carefully, I could see that there was still work to be done. After the first trade hits its stop loss it was deleting all the pending orders, which was not part of the system.
Another hour on and I had fixed all the bugs and it had started returning a positive balance… although I was still waiting on some more detail from my friend who would be able to spot any inconsistencies with his strategy.
Here’s my first positive chart on day 3:
I then decided to run it through an Optimization test to see if the Inputs needed tweaking, but still making sure I wasn’t curve fitting over such a short timeframe.
And here’s where I landed, after changing the TP’s to 19 pips instead of 20, above:
So, there we are. My first journey into building an EA has been short (5-6 hours of actual build & test time), relatively painless and successful!
Makes me wonder why I didn’t try this ages ago.
There are a few things still outstanding though:
[ul]
[li]I need more quality back data for further testing (shout out if you can help)
[/li][li]There may be additional feedback from my friend
[/li][/ul]
Leave a reply if you have any questions on FXDreema or the process I went through, happy to help.