Correct Solution that I could learn in past four years..

- GLUE the price in the expert, avoid redundant tester trades.
This will result "strategy tester compatible expert"
- COUNT real trades and tester trades, in some periods. they have to MATCH
- LEARN and USE strategy tester CORRECTLY

You can not develop a system based on fw. test. Final prove will be your pocket.

Thanks.

Yeah, but we're talking about real account live forward testing. Surely that is the be all and end all.

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Ash's Signals

Well that depends. On backtest you can reliably test for tens of years of data and that is what's really important. On live testing you would have to keep your EA active for literally tens of years to get the same testing results. Therefore that is not an option.

I still think that when using correctly, ie when you know what to do and what not to do (test scalping for example) backtesting results are good. If you are testing for example strategy that keeps the order open for at least couple of hours then the random fluctuations at the price at open or close don't really matter because more the trades, more the results will be similar to the tester.

Live trading for couple of months proves nothing because markets may be favourable to the hardcoded things on your advisor, not that your advisor works on the long run.

I think the main problem is that people curve fit and then wonder why testinfg results don't reflect the real world results. That's why you have to test your strategy on multiple currencies. If it works on more non interrelated pairs than it doesn't then you have a good strategy. If it only works on the currency you have been developing the system with, you have a curve fitted system.

Simple. And hard at the same time.

If backtests were reliable at all then I would be in favour of using them as a rough idea of performance. If you know your strategy well and how it already performs in given market conditions I see it as an advantage trading live and not using backtester to determine if it is any good or not. Until backtester has been improved this view of mine won't change, I see the points being made though. Only I have back tested reliable EAs out before and had losses or wins where they do not occur in live forward tests - it is the difference of making or breaking an account in backtest and you may go on to use it on live account to find either it runs better or much worse than back tests indicated. Just my experience that is all. I don't really know much about how backtester operates other than what i have read a little about. Another problem with backtester is that if my EA trades on more than one pair to offset losses as a hedge - which can be effective when done correctly then it cannot be back tested like this. Testing out individually is not perfect because of trade rules of EA and money management that is employed. Still I hope that this is fixed in MT5.

I agree curve fitting is an issue with EAs but backtester does not suffer from that in itself does it. I mean by that giving false results of tests in that respect. For now I stick to mental backtests done on chart as much as possible along with back tests and live forward tests on real money account. So just use this combination for now.

The impossibility to test hedging is really a BIG issue and makes testing complex strategies using MT impossible.

I hope the metaquotes would fix this immediatly, there is no clear technical reason why they restrict the trading o testing only to the one pair. That's one of my main problems with the tester. (Other is the lack of really good target specifications when using GA)

I saw your thread with the query about platforms that allow this - did you find any yet?

imo, Metatrader will never ever have anything this 'advanced', at least not while the bulk of Metaquotes' revenue is coming from the brokers - who have absolutely no interest in profitable traders...

btw, what about Smartquant - I had a feeling that this platform had this feature...

Never heard of them, seems like a good platform especially with the fact that it works with Interactive Brokers.

At the moment I'm thinking of implementing my own testing framework because the pair data for many pairs is available at several locations for free and it's not really complicated to code such a framework. At least I can then have the testing platform that I feel most comfortable with..

Smartquant has been around awhile and it's well regarded. I've played with their time-limited demo a few times and looks impressive, but has a steep learning curve...

Speaking of free data, I hope you aren't referring to the stuff Metaquotes provides! The more I investigate, the more I feel that Metaquotes are taking us for idiots. I posted an ultra-simple EA yesterday that highlights the number of price spikes between bars - all of these will trigger trades that would never occur in the real world... It doesn't take end-of-week into account but that's just another line of code...

Nope, I was refering to alpari historical data and yahoo historical data for example. In fact it's quite easy to to export metatrader data from your terminal to CSV via the history center. I already implemented one tester some time ago using that method.

Smartquant seems like a good platform. I have to study it a little further. The main concern I had when I went to the site was that the company has been sold to some other company so the price, especially the monthly fee may raise (they usually do in acquisitions)

edit: it seems the acquisition took place feb 2007 so it seems that the prices are fine. Seems like a very good platform, they even have market depth. Thanks a lot for the tip! This might be a platform I would like to use. Too bad they don't offer linux versions, I'm quite tired to booting to windows when i want to do any trading or trading research..

It's actually considerably cheaper than it used to be (haven't visited the site for awhile) Might re-consider getting it myself...