Running a Portfolio of EAs

Running several EAs at once can be steadier than betting everything on one, but only if the parts are genuinely different and you can actually see all of them. Most portfolios fail on both counts: the strategies turn out to be the same bet in different clothes, and half the accounts go unchecked for days. Diversifying is the easy part. Watching the whole thing is the job.

What a portfolio of EAs is

A portfolio of EAs is more than one automated strategy running against your capital at the same time. They might share a single account, sit on separate accounts, or run on different VPSs in different places. The idea is the same as any portfolio: no single strategy, currency pair or market condition should be able to sink the whole thing on its own.

Why run several

One EA is a single bet on a single idea. It has good months and bad months, and the bad months tend to arrive together. Running strategies that struggle at different times smooths the combined equity curve — while a trend follower is bleeding in a range-bound market, a mean-reversion EA may be having its best week. Real diversification comes from mixing three things:

Strategy — trend, range, breakout, carry. Different logic fails at different times.
Pair — spreading across EUR, GBP, JPY and commodity crosses instead of stacking four EAs on EURUSD.
Timeframe — a scalper on the M5 and a swing system on the H4 are barely in the same business.

The correlation trap

Here is where most EA portfolios go wrong. Three EAs that all buy the dollar when risk sentiment turns are not three strategies — they are one bet wearing three coats. When that bet is wrong, all three lose together, and the diversification you thought you paid for does nothing. This is correlation risk, and it hides easily: the EAs have different names, different pairs and different settings, yet they move as a block. The only way to know is to line up their trades and drawdowns side by side and look for the days they all sink at once.

Drawdown and margin add up

Each EA has its own drawdown, but your account only has one balance. Two systems that each dip 10% can hand you a 20% portfolio drawdown if they dip together, and a margin call does not care which EA caused it. Margin works the same way: five EAs opening positions at once can quietly eat your free margin until the next trade is rejected or the terminal starts closing positions for you. You have to watch the combined figure — maximum drawdown across the whole account, not per strategy — because that is the number that ends the account.

Allocating capital

Spreading money evenly across EAs is a reasonable start, but it is rarely the right end point. A volatile martingale-style EA and a steady low-risk system should not get the same slice, because equal capital does not mean equal risk. Size each allocation by how much drawdown it can inflict, not by how good last month looked. And leave headroom: an account run to the edge of its margin has no room for the losing streak that always eventually comes.

The real problem: watching them all

Two EAs are easy to keep an eye on. Six EAs across three accounts on two VPSs are not. The failures that cost real money are the quiet ones — an EA that stopped taking trades a week ago, a VPS that dropped its connection overnight, a single strategy drifting into a drawdown while the others mask it in the account total. Checking each terminal by hand does not scale, and the moment you stop checking is the moment one goes wrong. This, more than picking the strategies, is what running a portfolio actually demands.

Red flags

Everything drops on the same day. If your EAs share their worst days, you own one strategy, not several.
You cannot say what each EA did last week without opening every terminal to find out.
Combined drawdown is a mystery. You know each EA's number but never the account's.
An EA has been silent for days and you assumed it was simply a quiet market.

The Karnek note

Karnek shows every EA and every account on one dashboard, with the combined drawdown and margin you actually run — not a figure buried in six separate terminals. That is where portfolio trouble hides: one EA stops, a VPS drops overnight, or all your "diversified" strategies sink on the same day and no single terminal shows it. Karnek reads read-only from each terminal, so it can watch the whole portfolio but can never place a trade or touch a position.

See it in Karnek: monitor grid and martingale EAs, with drawdown alerts before they run away.