Hi All,

I wanted to share with you the analysis I’ve been doing on the PRTA product (paid 590 euro) vs our very own community built Mother of Dragons (big thanks to all who have contributed to this).

Firstly, this post is not meant to represent advice or an opinion one way or another, I am merely trying to present facts and allow others to draw their own conclusions.

I wanted to start things off by comparing two DAX algo’s. I have tried to make it as close to “like for like” as possible.

Test Plan.

I’m using PRTA DAX 2M Algo version 30 July 2020 Vs Mother of Dragons DAX 5M 2.2a.

I am backtesting them on 100,000 bars only as I don’t have access to 200,000.

I tested the same date range for both which is limited by the 2M PRTA to 22 January 2020 – 5 August 2020.

I tested the same starting capital of 10,000 AUD with 1 pip spread.

I tested 10 x 1A$ contracts for both.

Attached are the results and my summary thoughts which I open for feedback. 

1. It’s important to assess the results on a weekly basis, too many algo providers are supplying monthly views and I find it a little misleading. The reason behind this is that if you are having multiple weeks of big losses in just a couple of months it will significantly impact your trust and phycology when keeping it running.
2. It’s important to look beyond “win rate” – win rate is deceiving and it is not a good indicator of a successful algo because your winners might be small and your looser might be big.
3. Focus on Gain/Loss ratio – you don’t want to see the algo taking massive losses and wiping out all the gains.
4. Understand the drawdown – again, you need to consider how much equity you are going to need to have spare to suffer losses, both in current trades and closed trades. You don’t want to see big drawdown.
5. Time in market – the less time the better, the more time the more risk of some world event impacting your trade.
6. Average executed orders – on the lower timeframes 1-2 trades a day is about right over a 6 month period. You don’t want too many or two few (in my opinion)
7. Consecutive Losses – pretty obvious but you don’t want to see many consecutive losses.
8. You want to look at what the market did in the back test timeframe and how the algos handled it. e.g Did the market go up and was it successful at taking longs vs shorts.

Results (winner in bold)

Gain: MOD – $32,700 (327%) vs PRTA – $19,193 (191.93%)
% Of Winning Trades: PRTA – 91.46% vs (MOD -89.58%)
Gain /Loss Ratio: MOD 3.45 vs (PRTA 2.32)
Time in market: MOD 12.62% vs (PRTA 19.15%)
Max Run Up: MOD $33,529 vs (PRTA $21,067)
Max DrawDown: MOD $6,076 vs (PRTA $7,078)

In summary, based on this test data MOD is the winner – especially if you look at the long vs shorts trades and what the market was doing when they each made their losses and gains. It looks like PRTA has issues with short trades while MOD is much better in this area and can better handle all the different types of market conditions. With negative market moves possible on the horizon I would want to be very confident that PRTA could handle them.

I do want to thank Marco and the PRTA team for providing me with the algos for back and live testing. I think they have some great ideas but I just want people to really understand what they are buying / renting before handing over the money.

Some other factors to consider are that we had some pretty annoying setup issues with PRTA and Timezones. They have given us a workaround for that by making a global time zone setting change but it’s not ideal. If you get this wrong, you are likely to enter trades out of hours which can add to risk.

Hope you find this helpful.

Cheers,

MOD-DAX-M5-22.01.20-05.08.20.png PRTA-DAX-M2-22.01.20-05.08.20.png Screen-Shot-2020-08-05-at-4.46.54-PM.png