MENU

EvoAI Help

Welcome to the EvoAI help page. I’ll guide you through how to use EvoAI to improve productivity when it comes to MT4 testing and optimisation.

Download and Installation

You can download EvoAI here, then run the downloaded installer package. It will look something like this:

EvoAI Setup

Follow the onscreen instructions to install the EvoAI software which will put a link on the desktop and also the start programs list under EvoAI. If you don’t already have MT4 installed then this should be installed before running EvoAI, you can find the download link from here. Click on the EvoAI shortcut to launch the application.

Warning

EvoAI optimisation is incompatible with Tick Data Suite, if you have it installed please disable Tick Data Suite before initialising and optimising due to the way it injects MT4.

Configuration

The first thing to do once you have EvoAI running for the first time is to open the preferences screen by selecting it from the view menu. You are presented with the following options:

You no longer have to find broker server IP/URL by searching in the .srv files, just click the select button and EvoAI extracts all of the IP addresses from the .srv files for you to select from a drop down.

Preference Screen

History Manager

The History Manager is used for downloading and exporting tick data to MT4. Select the pairs from the list (Hold CTRL key and click to select multiple) and then click on the start date to select the start date of the data you wish to download then click the download button. Downloads are from a dedicated server using prepackaged data making it as fast as possible.

To view the downloaded data, select the pair from the list, select the timeframe, from and to dates then click the load data button. The tick data gets converted to time series data for display so large time spans can take some time to process so keep it in mind when viewing data in this way.

To export downloaded data to MT4 select the symbol, then the start and end dates, then select the required time frames and then click the export button.

Preference Screen

MT4 Reports

The MT4 Reports screen is used to load MT4 .htm reports, analysing them and displays the results. In the future there will be an option to combine reports to see how EAs perform in combination across multiple pairs.

Preference Screen

MT4 Optimiser

The MT4 Optimiser screen is used for walk forward optimisation of EAs to find settings that are likely to work going forward. You can select the following options:

The first time you use the optimiser you will need to click the Initialise MT4 button, this is also required if you make changes to the server settings in preferences. This will trigger MT4 to load in the background and initialise the data folders and configure for testing.

Don’t worry about the way the instances of MT4 are setup, EvoAI manages the data folders and automatically installs EAs from your chosen MT4 installation selected in preferences. Tick data is automatically downloaded for the optimisation period and is exported to a shared data folder so there is no unnecessary data duplication.

Now that the MT4 instances are initialised the settings button and optimise button become available. Click the settings button to choose the EA settings to use for testing, this can take a few seconds first time as the settings are loaded from MT4. Tick the optimise check box for settings you wish to optimise having chosen start, step and stop parameters for them. It is currently only possible to optimise numeric properties. Once you have finished choosing settings click the save button.

Now that all settings have been chosen you can click the optimise button and start the optimisation. Results are listed in order of profit and the highest profit result is displayed. Once the optimisation is complete, you can select the results from the list to display the result on the graph to the right. Set files can then be exported for use with MT4 by selecting the result and clicking the “Export .set” button.

Preference Screen

MT4 Optimiser Tips

If you wish to optimise and use your computer at the same time it’s best to add a user to windows for this and setup EvoAI to run under that user then switch back to the user you normally use and it will run EvoAI in the background and MT4 doesn’t take focus when it loads and MT4 is silent. MT4 has a process limit of 32 coppies running at the same time per windows user account, if you wish to run more then you would need to create a second windows user and run EvoAI on both accounts to split the optimisation tasks and increase the limit to 64 threads.