Breakout Neuro EA drawdown and work in progress

Hmmm - the Breakout Neuro EA is in a big drawdown at the moment. Taking the point that I first started forward testing on 7th August to now, it had a peak equity of about +1,600 pips with a drawdown of -300 pips, but then the drawdown started in earnest and is now -900 pips. That's partly bad news, but I'm hoping that this is normal behaviour - it is after all a fixed optimisation from only three months of data which is potentially starting to lose its relevance.

The work I am doing now is

• Was the initial gain a fluke? I think it's time to manually re-optimise the fixed neural network to see if it can again show a period of profitability
• Take the concept further to a self-optimising neural network that frequently goes through a learning cycle, say every day or perhaps driven by "failure", ie a series of losing trades
• Since the optimisation relies heavily on the fitness measurement from the validation equity curve, I'm expecting to have to spend time on getting that right. Is the profit/drawdown ratio good enough, or will it benefit from a more sophisticated form of equity curve measurement such as Sharpe ratio (profit/standard deviation)?
• The EA engine I used could also do with some tweaking, because it currently issues long and short trades blindly. Instead I will change it so that new long positions will first exit any existing short positions, and vice versa.