does the back tester use margin?

 
I have finally got an EA working and taking all winning trades. it dont trade often but when it does it wins. However I am using a high stoploss and I dont know if its taking into account margin. This would change things in the real world if I couldn't cover my margin waiting for the take profit to hit.
 
Yes the tester simulates margin.

If you are worried about margin and leverage, you are not controlling your risk. Never risk more than a small percentage of your trading funds, certainly less than 2% per trade, 6% total.

Risk depends on your initial stop loss, lot size, and the value of the pair. It does not depend on margin and leverage. No SL means you have infinite risk.

  1. You place the stop where it needs to be — where the reason for the trade is no longer valid. E.g. trading a support bounce the stop goes below the support.
  2. AccountBalance * percent/100 = RISK = OrderLots * (|OrderOpenPrice - OrderStopLoss| * DeltaPerLot + CommissionPerLot) (Note OOP-OSL includes the spread, and DeltaPerLot is usually around $10/pip but it takes account of the exchange rates of the pair vs. your account currency.)
  3. Do NOT use TickValue by itself - DeltaPerLot and verify that MODE_TICKVALUE is returning a value in your deposit currency, as promised by the documentation, or whether it is returning a value in the instrument's base currency.
              MODE_TICKVALUE is not reliable on non-fx instruments with many brokers - MQL4 programming forum 2017.10.10
              Is there an universal solution for Tick value? - Currency Pairs - General - MQL5 programming forum 2018.02.11
              Lot value calculation off by a factor of 100 - MQL5 programming forum 2019.07.19
  4. You must normalize lots properly and check against min and max.
  5. You must also check FreeMargin to avoid stop out

Most pairs are worth about $10 per PIP. A $5 risk with a (very small) 5 PIP SL is $5/$10/5 or 0.1 Lots maximum.

Reason: