MT4 optimization parameters (balance/profitfactor/DD/payoff)

The genetic optimization in MT4 has separate options, none of which are well balanced, for optimizing strategies. There is also one titled “custom”.

Anyone have any experience playing with this custom feature? I wouldn’t even know where to start. My main focus would be finding the smoothest equity curves with minimal DD and maximal net profit. Basically a weighted fitness score between standard deviation, stability, net profit, and max DD %. Impossible to do really with its default options. Currently it takes me a lot of trial and error sorting through the opt results the default settings produce to find a well balanced parameter set.

Are there plugin files anywhere available for custom optimizations? I am not a coder.

I’ve had a play with this. Unfortunately the build of MT4 I was using at the time (700 ish) had a bug which meant the custom function hung forever.

The difficulty is you have to implement the functions to calculate smooth curves from the trade history, drawdown etc. I totally agree that the choices MT4 gives by default are mostly useless. In SQ I use a mixture of stability, return/drawdown and profit factor plus a few others to rank the best strategies/settings.

It’s something on my TO DO list to look at again in MT4, but I have a sneaking suspicion it still probably doesn’t work.

Ultimately the issue is that MT4 is terrible at backtesting and optimization. It hasn’t had any new features for many years, it’s very slow and very limited.  It’s almost like MetaQuotes sell this concept to brokers as “Don’t worry, no one is going to find a Holy Grail strategy using this, your profits as a broker are guaranteed…” 😉

Ultimately the issue is that MT4 is terrible at backtesting and optimization. It hasn’t had any new features for many years, it’s very slow and very limited.  It’s almost like MetaQuotes sell this concept to brokers as “Don’t worry, no one is going to find a Holy Grail strategy using this, your profits as a broker are guaranteed…” 😉

This is why I pray Marc makes a testing/optimization platform or allows EA Wizard files to be used in SQ. MT4 is a bottleneck on EA Wizard. Basically requires 3rd party software.