To Optimize or not to Optimize ? ... The winalot and EAzeGor expert advisors

If you have been reading my blog recently you may have read my reviews on the winalot and EAzeGor expert advisors made by the easy-ea company. You may have noticed that both of these reviews had a quiet favorable tone to them because I think both of this experts fulfill a good chunk of my criteria for a long term profitable expert advisor. However, I did say in both cases that backtesting from 1999 was missing and that such testing would be necessary to assess long term profitability.

After requesting backtesting results from 1999 the company answered that they did not have such tests because experts were optimized on an 18 month basis and were then traded in optimized settings. This is obvioulsy the reason why such limited backtesting is available on their website, because of course, they cannot show further backtests if settings are bound to change on the middle of the expert's testing.

Now, the big question arises. Is this good or is this bad ? To optimize or not to optimize ? Well, I of course always favor expert advisors that can self adapt to a certain extent like the god's gift ATR because even though there is an inherent lag in the adaptation, the lag is less than 30 days long and the expert just worries about aligning itself against market conditions. Optimization using 18 months of data could also be a strategy you could use, however, it has to be said that if market conditions for the next 6 months are very different from the past 18 months, then the system is likely to fall into draw down but then, it might realign once optimization is done again. The live testing done on both experts confirms at the moment that this optimization strategy works albeit on the changes happening during the past year.

Given this fact, the fact that considerable live testing exists and the fact that the expert advisor's trading style fits many characteristics I demand from profitable trading systems I will say that this experts are worth testing. From next Sunday a demo account will be opened and the testing of the winalot EA will start with testing results being commented each week on my weekly newsletter. Susbcribers should also expect the next newsletter to include demo account investor access information.

If you would like to learn more about automated trading systems and what the necessary characteristics for a profitable trading systems are (and why most commercial experts out there just fail bluntly) please consider buying my ebook on automated trading or subscribing to my weekly newsletter to receive updates and check the live and demo accounts I am running with several expert advisors. I hope you enjoyed this article !

Forex Expert Advisors : The Winalot expert advisor an unbiased review

For the last few days I have been aggressively looking at, analyzing and reviewing trading systems I have come up with. The most recent system I found is called Winalot which is sold by the easy-ea.com company. This post will therefore be dedicated at the exhaustive review of this expert advisor through the evidence offered by the creators on their website.

Well, I can say that they easy-ea website is pretty much one of the simplest websites I have ever seen regarding commercial expert advisors, not a lot of hype and cutting straight to the evidence. They offer back testing and presumably live testing information. Their back testing is done year by year and goes back up until 2007 which I find pretty odd given the fact that his system could have been easily backtested from 1999. Since the market changed completely between 2006 and 2009 it is not surprise that they may have omitted previously unprofitable trading periods.

The expert advisor also offers a forward testing statement from December 2008 to date which is something you could say impressive for a commercial expert advisor. After nearly a year of trading they achieve a profit near 50% which I consider reasonable for a forex automated trading system. Now, the backtesting should be at least an indicative of performance since position sizes are higher than 20 pips which should make interpolation errors small. When comparing live and forward testing you do see discrepancies which could be because both the feed and the EA opening trades within bars rather than based on bar closing values. The system underestimates draw down a lot when you compare statements. For example, backtesting says only 3 losing trades happened in March 2009 while you see 5 on live testing. Of course, the profit targets in backtesting are too unrealistic because of some artifact of the expert's logic (such as the opening of positions I just mentioned) but the live testing statements seem to achieve reasonable profit targets with reasonable draw downs. Given the fact that the risk to reward ratio is 2:1, which is borderline acceptable for me, I would say that this system could be worth testing if we had a way to confirm long term profitability since 2000.

However, since they fail to provide us with this data for some reason and we can only know the EA is profitable under 2009 conditions I am inclined to say that there is not sufficient data for this EA to be tested and used by us. The creators should modify the EA to make backtesting reliable so that we could have a measure of adaptability and consistency. While this happens I will have to say that this EA is not worth trading because there is not enough evidence of it's longer term profitability. However I certainly applaud the author's drive to provide long term live testing and backtesting information.

If you would like to learn about free long term stable profitable trading systems and how you can too start earning money in the forex market using trading systems please consider buying my ebook on automated trading or subscribing to my weekly newsletter to receive updates and check the live and demo accounts I am running with several expert advisors. I hope you enjoyed this article !