Forum stransfer: Submitted by Joe T on April 21, 2009 - 18:34.
I am very new to Forex, and MQL.
I am trying to learn as much as I can, as soon as I can. However, I have a day job and a family, and unfortunately I simply do not have the time to spend in front of a computer to trade the way I'd need to trade in order to make a living doing it, especially with the amount of capital I am starting with.
And so, I am taking it upon myself to develop (in whatever free time I have) some EAs based on strategies here, and then tweaked based on testing and optimization. I do not want to run just any old thing, and I have a lot of different things I want to test before I run with things. I also wish to devise EAs that stand the test of the last 10 years, not just the last 3 months. I have different ideas on how to accomplish that, but I need time.
One of my big issues at the moment is that the testing and optimization process takes a very long time to run through. I can literally test a given strategy for two weeks on one currency pair alone because it takes hours to go through a certain number of scenarios on the full 10 years of data. I don't want to run it continuously because it's the family computer, and the optimization process slows other processes down significantly.
I am considering buying a new computer strictly for testing. But before I do that, I am hoping that one of the reasons why the testing takes so long is my own computer limitation. Can anyone suggest what functionality I should look for in speeding this process up dramatically? Is it simply about the need for more RAM? Are there certain processors that perform better than others? The primary purpose of this computer would be to crank away the testing of EAs. Other than for downloading new data, it doesn't even have to be connected to the internet. (Now I just need to convince my wife that the new, faster, computer should be used for this...)
Any input woould be appreciated.