Z1 / Z2 profit so far

Is someone already running Z1 or Z2 with real money? In the last 6 weeks they made about EUR 2500 profit. If you had started both in January with EUR 50 per trade, you had meanwhile about 11,000 EUR.

I am looking to set it up next month. But does it work on fxcm microaccounts?

Sure, but as far as I know, FXCM has only micro lots with their MT4 accounts. The normal account have only mini lots, not micro lots.

What are your setting for margin and risk?

Margin 50, risk 10. But better start with the default setting (Margin 20).

With the max capital restriction of $7000, the chance of getting a margin call seem quite high, when I look at the (intraday) drawdowns of Z1!

Within the usual trading risk, all included strategies are safe for the $7K limit. An intraday drawdown has no effect on profit and can't cause a margin call. This can only happen with a real drawdown.

That's not true. A margin call occurs whenever the Usable Margin reaches 0. So when there is a spike down (or up) and you have not enough capital at any given time, your positions will be closed.

Right. That "spike down" is a drawdown (not "intraday drawdown") and can cause a margin call.

There are subtle differences between drawdown, intraday drawdown, balance, and equity. You have to know them for knowing your risk. They are explained here: http://zorro-trader.com/manual/en/performance.htm. Look into the example under "Remarks".

As a rule of thumb, a real drawdown is bad for your account, an intraday drawdown is bad for your nerves.

A drawdown is a drawdown.both reduces available money.the only difference is a floating DD and balance DD. The floating DD happens with open position(s) and affecting the account-equity. This could lead to a margin-call. A margin call happens mostly if you are overleveraged or if you not limit your losses with sound stopploss or false moneymanagement.
An balance DD occures, if your balance shrinks of too many losses in a row and if your winning trades did not overweight your losing trades.

Any update on the z1 and/or z2 live performance?

I'd like to hear from anyone who has actually made any money from trading this live yet rather than theory.

I have $2000 that I can afford to lose to test this with fxcm but can anyone tell me what settings for margin and risk I should use to enable me to run this with a starting capital of $2000. I can put up more if required.

The current Z1 and Z2 versions underperform due to the wrong rollover value mentioned here. They are still profitable, but not as profitable as they should, so better wait for the next update until trading with real money. $2000 is fine, but only for trading one of them - if you must choose, use Z2.

Z2 made €1300 since October 1st with 50/10 settings on a demo account.

Ok, thanks. Shame it wasn't live testing. I'm still to hear from anyone who has actually put their money on the line.

On the backtest chart it seems that z1 has long spells where it takes no trades at all. What happens there?

Also it is not profitable with usdcad, usdchf and oil. Could they be removed from the script?

Thanks for the feedback JCL - any idea when the next z1/z2 with these improvements will be released? Cheers, Lee

I hope this week - even with our relatively fast machines, any WFO test on Z1 or Z2 needs almost a day. This makes work on Z1/Z2 a little slow.

We did not manually remove unprofitable components as this would violate the out-of-sample test method and make the test results too optimistic. But you can do that for trading of course. For manually excluding an asset, edit the file Data\Z12.fac and place minus signs in front of all OptimalF factors of that asset. You can find an example here:

http://zorro-trader.com/manual/en/income.htm

Mmmh. I see after half a year later nobody does trading Z1/2 live? No FXmybook links ? ...

I'm definitely not a "computer guy", but I recently read something about "cloud servers" that utilize the vacant (or unused) portions of thousands of PCs around the world to help users who have large amounts of data to crunch. Instead of needing to buy & setup large computers, they can rent time on the "cloud" for these large tasks.

Would this be helpful for WFO testing?

Yes. You can rent such cloud servers f.i. from Amazon. We don't do that because we have about 30 PCs here for WFO calculations, but normally they can be helpful.

In a post above, it's stated "Within the usual trading risk, all included strategies are safe for the $7K limit". Is this still true if both Margin & Risk sliders are max'd?

With what minimum/maximum initial funding in the account? (To prevent both margin call at the one end, and exceeding $7k without time to withdraw at the other - said he hoptimistically :))?

Clarification re. minimum initial funding: Can the Capital required from Test results be safely used for this? Does it have to be "safety margined" by adding 50%? Doubling?

The "safe" means with default settings, Margin at 50. And "safe" is relative: The chance of a margin call is low, but not zero.

For funding, my suggestion is having the displayed required capital in the broker account, and about the same amount in reserve if you need to remargin.

Understand that "safe" is not absolute (in all aspects of life! :)).

For remargin trigger, use remaining unused margin = Margin slider * Risk slider? For example, remargin when remaining unused margin = 50 * 10 = $500 using the default settings?

And at the other end (the $7k limit so we don't have a problem), withdraw capital trigger = $7k - Margin slider * Risk slider * # open trades? For example, withdraw capital when account balance is $7k - 50 * 10 * 3 = $5.5k using the default settings & 3 open trades?

Thanks.

Hiho together,

i startet Z2 some weeks ago and for your info here is the MT4i live link. I will let it run. So you can see how it takes progress. This Zorro instance is running under an Amazon free VPS.

MT4i - SundanceZ2

Hope it will do better in the next weeks.

PS: Haven't changed any settings for Z2.

Hiho again,

so i ended the Z2 demo test. The link above is no longer valid.
Now i have a 1000€ live account running on the Amazon free VPS using the Z12 strategie. OOTB just with a margin set to 3.

MT4i - Sundance Z12 live

see you guys and hoping to see some profits

Thanks for letting us follow your live account. It will be great to watch real money.

Good luck.

Good stuff Sundance thanks for sharing your live account venture with us, good luck

My pleasure guys. I had those 1000€ for nearly 20 month on that ActivTrades account and waited for the right moment. After many many hours of programming EA's reading hundreds of threads and using countless indis, i thought to give Zorro a real chance :-)

Hi Sundance,

are you running this on a ActivTrades account? How do you handle the future-based CFD's with Zorro?

Good luck Sundance! :thumbsup:

Good luck!

Hi Chaosfreak,

i haven't changed any setting of Z12. Have i overlooked something? What do you mean with 'how do you handle...'. Don't scary me :-)

Z12 also trades assets like SPX500 or NAS100. ActivTrades offers these as CFD's which are based on futures and future contracts expire every (x) month. They have also different names, for example NAS100 is actually UsaTecSep13. Hope I didn't confuse you too much.

Sure you confused me very much.
What i see that the NAS100 wasn't found by Z12. So o thougth that it just won't trade it!? I will look at it and also the SPX500 which he has found but will check if it is really the same thing here.
Thank you very much for the hint!!

So. Next post. I have a problem with Z12 with the trades it opened.



Open orders:
Ticket Open time Type Lots Symbol Open S/L T/P Close Price Comm Swap Profit Pips
23355499 2013/07/08 22:16:11 Buy 0.01 AUDUSD 0.9143 0.8636 0.9209 0.00 0.08 5.15 66.0
Magic #42378
23358470 2013/07/09 10:16:15 Sell 0.01 USDJPY 101.21 106.06 100.04 0.00 0.00 9.13 117.0
Magic #42378
23365705 2013/07/10 06:16:14 Sell 0.01 USDCHF 0.9729 1.0099 0.9692 0.00 0.00 2.98 37.0
Magic #42378
23367964 2013/07/10 10:16:19 Sell 0.01 USDCAD 1.0499 1.0691 1.0516 0.00 0.00 - 1.26 - 17.0
Magic #42378
23367966 2013/07/10 10:16:20 Sell 0.01 USDCAD 1.0499 1.0691 1.0516 0.00 0.00 - 1.26 - 17.0


Why has it opened two times USDCAD within two seconds?

Just an update. Because i have a problem with the combination of Zorro and my ActivTrades account i can't trade live. Tomorrow the support will take a look at it and i hope to be live again on Wednesday.

Good luck with it. I was enjoying watching you make some real money.

Okay. The guys from Zorro did it. I think it was my fault. There is a Z.ini. You can set a value which says that you only wan't to trade FX. Thats it. Now i hope also to get rid of the time zone 0 message and then i will be online again :-)

PS: Funny thing is. Why has it worked for the first four days of live trading?

Back again. I found my problem with those time zone message!
I had set the clock of the Amamzon VPS to GMT and not GMT+1. Now it works!!

I'am online again guys. Thumbs up and wish me good luck :-)

Good Luck to you, Ben gave you a nicely start Is the account trading FX only?

Now its FX only. The parameter within the Z.ini is set to 1


PS: I closed the last trades manually cause of the time zone message i've got all the time.

I wonder, would my test survived longer if I traded FX only (less assets, less trouble with broker interface)?

But then again, I wanted to simulate strategies with virgin parameters, and as close as possible to what strategy creator had in mind when he wrote and optimized it.

jcl, is there any new version on the horizon? IIRC, you mentioned there could be something prepared for this week? I'm bored.

No, your test would probably not have survived longer with FX only.

We have indeed found a bug in the FXCM API, but are not sure if this was the reason of the crashes that you experienced. Do you still have the problem that it crashes as soon as you start? And is this on a private PC or a VPS? In the latter case, could you give us temporary access to that VPS with a Teamviewer session? Testing Sundance's system with Teamviever has been very helpful for finding the problem.

I'm currently doing nothing. Just waiting for the new version, hoping that things will improve. If the new version doesn't resolve crashes, I'll consider doing the teamviewer thing (have to research first how that actually works).

Anyway, I've documented my crashes best I could in the relevent topic on the forum. The latest problem was a general instability, Zorro's would crash hour or two after started, and there are quite weird log entries. You still can download logs from the latest run from the links in my signature.

I watched today, but didn't see any activity.
Maybe it needs to study a little before trading again?

My Z2 demo did well today with the UDS/CHF. It's a Z2nfa running on FXCM. Has been stable on my PC. I may try setting up the VPS again in a week or so.

If yours keeps looking go & my demos seem stable & profitable maybe I'll try live trading in the Fall.

Yeah. The first time i started Z12 it took ~just a little more than 24 hours for the first trade to take. So i have to wait. Better it takes it time and then it does the right decision :-)

Z2 was my first thought but then i saw Z12 and its my favorite one. Good to hear you are successfull too. The Amazon-VPS seems to run stable and the mem of 640MB seems enough for Zorro and a MT4 instance.

Edit: Z12 has H4 as base timeframe. So it will take its time to trade. Hope that tomorrow there will be some activity. But price will tell and i will patiently wait :-)

So. Z12 made its first trade tonight. So everything is fine.