Hi,

Just looked for performance of Z2 from acidburn's demo and my own real account. Results are way too different, curves somewhere different somewhere similar and trades taken differently.

1. acidburn's FXCM demo
2. my FXCM real

For me from first look it seems quite much difference to be sure that systems behave in comparable manner between different accounts (and according to backtesting performance????).

Any good thoughts/ideas? Somebody can show more Z2 results on myfxbook?

I think it's probably because:
- you have different margin/risk settings than acid (he has them maxed out. Plus changed them sometime/restarted often)
- your bars may start at another time than acid's
- probably some other "random factor" thats implemented in the Zorro strategies?

Also check on my page have you been running the same version of Zorro in all the same periods. From what I understand, all Z strategies are reoptimized for every release and I upgrade often & fast. If we were running different versions in the past, I think the results could differ wildly.

At first I thought I would run only stable versions, and after they've been proved stable. But due to lots of initial instability I changed my mind and I now run each and every release, beta or not, I don't mind. It's all paper money, anyway.

Even when you run the exact same strategys with the same settings you will get different trades. As 3DCat guessed, the Z strategys have some random factor for taking trades...

Yes, I know, and agree about:

1) different bars timing
2) small shifts w ACIDBURN in version timing (I checked), big differences coming trading same version
3) secret random factor (if it exists additionally to bar changes) ???
4) one or two orders not taken due to margin requirments (according to logs) but only one-two

But this doesn't answer some fundamental design problems which I see:

1) if so small differences (bar shifts, etc) produce so big changes, that means that strategy is very unstable and trade-chain dependent, meaning you can be profitable or non-profitable depending when U start trading each trade and this is just random
2) if I backtest the same period that I was running real, I will get different performance, meaning I can't compare how realistic are backtests to reality and do they at all have something in common. On Mt4 this is common problem, may be less on FXCM API
3) if I can't compare backtest w reality whats the worth in further actions like optimizing, WFA, ??? Even strategy developement.....

I don't blame Zorro, I like its idea and the program itself - thanks a lot to developers. But looks like the concept is quite contradictory in its nature: random things and serious trading. Please don't kill me for this outlook... May be JCL or smb else has different conclusions from my points...

Lets see how it will go further. May be smb else can add links to more accounts to compare running same strategies?

Well, the Z systems are trained with six times oversampling and are very, very robust against price noise and bar shifts. And of course a backtest of the same period gives you a similar result as real trading. A different result would be a severe bug of the simulator and would have been noticed long ago. We check the Z systems at every release by backtesting past weeks.

There can be many reasons why your profits are different to the profits of other people. Frequent trade interruptions or different account parameters, ini parameters, and slider settings can have large influence on profit. But whatever the reason, it has nothing to do with sensibility to bar shifts or false backtests.

Hello everybody.
Is normal that every strategy is pretty much at breakeven or going through a draw down period on any account I see linked.
Do I have to test by myself the strategies to understand how long is the draw down for each ?

Regards.

You can look at the manual. there you see the equity curves of the different Z strategies. Now close your eyes and point with your finger somewhere on that curve. At that point in time look at the equity curve. Draw a horizontal line just at the point where the equity is at the time you pointed with your finger. Most of the time you will see a draw down. That is normal cause the equity goes in waves. Looser trades are part of the game and at the start they will surely let your account go into a drawdown before leaving the area of 0 profit :-)

Hopefully I see that in the future on my live account too. :-)

I have seen my live Zs take great runs up and then give a lot of it back. Overall I have decided two things. The first is to set my Margin slider (i.e. risk) to a value low enough so that I can handle the ups and downs. But really this feeds into a trader psychology situation which I continuously work on. Trading is an inconsistent game and not many people have the mentality to handle it.

And secondly, I am planning to leave my account trade away for a year before making any serious decisions on continuing with Zs. When I look at the equity curves, they are in a healthy profit after any one year period. So I think that is a good length of time. In mean time, I plan to continue working on my own systems.

But Sundance points, drawdowns occur and you have to wait some time before you can extract profits and expect to stay above the break even line.

I know that any trading system goes inevitably through draw down periods, with no exceptions for the Z-strategies.
Since the traders/developers behind Zorro sound quite experienced I wanted to understand what sort of time window they consider if they had to trade for an income.

Regards.