Hi acidburn,
How do you trade them together on the same account? I get a broker interface error.
You can't on the same machine. You need 2 different machines to trade 2 strategies at the same time.
I ran the backtests on various levels of risk and margin.
I understand margin is the average margin committed to a trade. Risk factor is kind of soft limit on how far that can be multiplied for an individual trade, but it can exceed that to allow a trade take place, e.g if the min lot size is too big for the calculated lot size.
In backtesting, risk tends not be as influential as margin in Z2 at least, and for the same margin there is a sweet range for risk (10-30 seems to it for my proposed level of real investment) Beyond 30 the parameters appear to level out, below 10 overall performance seems to be poorer.
The margin is the one to adjust first until you get parameters for capital required close to what you are prepared to lose for real, then adjust risk to see if it improves the output.
I'm not sure how useful any of that is, it may be another version of overfitting, either way I'd decide the parameters and let it off, adjusting the sliders afterwards doesn't sound like it would be helpful, especially not if you are evaluating.
At last a trade was triggered on Z2 USD/JPY long 6 at 97.40 Risk 144. Not a bad looking trade on a 4hr chart to my unscientific trader eye. my settings are 50 10 0 - giving an sort of max risk per trade of €500. I think the 144 means amount risked on this trade in €.
Thank you for sharing your insight. Though, I will probably stay confused for a while. And I'm not complaining, it can't be any different when an aspiring quant with a lot to learn meets black box strategy. Having backtests and some documentation helps, but I still need to spend some time with Zorro before I can even properly formulate questions to ask.
One promising thing about all this is that jcl is such a nice guy, so I'm confident it's worth investing my time in Zorro.
One thing, I've seen elsewhere on the forum that max risk per trade could be approximated by risk * margin formula. But, that confuses me very much, and here's why: say you invest $5000 capital (should be enough for both Z1 & Z2) and run the strategy with default 50/10. That would mean you risk up to $500 or 10% of the capital per trade, right? But, what if you run the same default parameters on the demo account, which btw can be opened only with $50000 of starting capital. Now default parameters and max risk per trade calculated by that formula mean something very different. You're now risking only 1% of the capital. By that measure, earning 1.6% after a month or so, as I've managed to do, is quite nice. But I wonder how much would I have earned if I matched the risk of the $5k account? But, alas, I can't move the slider to that position. It stops at 50, so max risk per trade becomes $2500 which is only 5% of the capital.
And yes, I started moving both sliders to the right, after I learned about the formula, but I forgot to do it so many times, that many trades ended open with default 50/10. Argh..
So, as a conclusion either the formula is wrong, or the sliders are not adequate or I got something wrong. Currently, I'm heavily betting on the third option.
Anyway, my Z2fx has also opened long 2@97.42 USD/JPY. See, only 2k, with 50k in account, such a shame.
Too bad the trade won't stay alive much longer, as per my plan to stop trading Z2.
I'm skipping your commentary about SB, because I know nothing about that, sorry.
