Trading and Developing on MT4 ; Backtesting on MT5

 

Hello this is my first post ! I have been reading this forum for a while and first of all want to say huge thanks to all the dedicated smart individuals who contributed so much of their time and efforts - great stuff !

I'm reading a lot of good information on back testing / optimization / forward walk / MAE MFE and all the rest of the important information regarding testing and evaluating EA's. Some of the older threads from a few years back provide some good instructions / coding / etc. on doing various things, but I've noticed that a lot is also available built-into MT5. I have no doubt that the older solutions can still be put to good use, but especially now that the latest MT4 releases are much more integrated with MT5 and MQL5, wouldn't it make a lot of sense to somehow use all of that MT5 functionality ? One problem is of course that not many brokers offer MT5 and here is what I would like to ask - would it be a good idea to :

  • develop MQL4 on MT4
  • convert MQL4 to MQL5
  • do all of the back testing in MT5
  • if everything is good so far go back to MT4 for demo trading / live trading / etc.

The points might not be 100% correct but hopefully the idea is clear - what I'm concerned about is how indicators might behave / if there might be any "system level" differences that can affect performance and so on. Anyone had any experience with this or can direct me to information ?

Thanks ! 

 
MT5 is a full OOP. MT4 is like a hybrid and is not a full OOP. Many still likes using MT4 compared to MT5. MT5 doesn't allow hedging which MT4 can (depends on broker).
 

Thanks - yes this is true. My idea was to still use MT4 because it seems that most brokers don't use MT5 (or in limited way), but just do as much of the backtesting on MT5, because looks like it has all of the forward walk / MAE-MFE / and a lot more functionality already built-in . Let's say my EA's only use "standard" indicators and no hedging, then I was just hoping to save a lot of work backtesting in MT5 using the built-in tools, then switch back to MT4 for the actual trading. Is this a good idea, or are there "pitfalls" I'm not aware of ?

 
I have no experience with mt5 but I have heard mt5 cannot backtest using one's own tickdata. But I cannot assert this for sure!
 

Thanks gooly I will invest some time and effort to look into MT5 backtesting, and will make sure to post my experiences . . .

Reason: