does any strategy tester work?
Thank you for this thread, Shimodax. I do hope you are right in your claim that the strategy tester is accurate. While it may be true that expert advisors that are not yielding profit in backtesting will never be successful in live trading, profitable systems in backtesting will not necessarily make money, at least not at the moment.
While one can always say that the future cannot be predicted from the past, therefore you will never know if it will work in live trading, this current Strategy Tester will overestimate the profit of systems. A system that is profitable on Strategy Tester may not be so on live trading because there is no spread built into backtesting.
see "Symbol Properties in Strategy Tester--spread"
I hope this can be fixed very soon - it really limits the usefulness of this marvellous Strategy Tester. Although it has been said that swap fees are included, I have not been able to find any on the results of my InterbankFX version.
As far as I know the zero spread problem was only with some brokers. Also Slawa recently said in another thread, that the zero spread was fixed with InterbankFX and that the latest download from the website (although still build 182) does it correctly with them.
Many problems of the backtester seem to have been MT3 which as I understand had quite predictable moves that could be exploited. But I believe that in MT4, as long as you not make intrabar trades (or not mostly) and if you have time frame data for these bars, results are good enough for a backtester. The good thing with the backtester (unlike many other) is that you can visually verify the deals.
And in fact sometimes when backtesting in times where you don't have data for small time frames your live results could even be better than the backtest, because at times the slippage is quite high in backtesting.
All in all I think the backtester gives a good overview to check if a theory works.
Markus
Many problems of the backtester seem to have been MT3 which as I understand had quite predictable moves that could be exploited. But I believe that in MT4, as long as you not make intrabar trades (or not mostly) and if you have time frame data for these bars, results are good enough for a backtester. The good thing with the backtester (unlike many other) is that you can visually verify the deals.
And in fact sometimes when backtesting in times where you don't have data for small time frames your live results could even be better than the backtest, because at times the slippage is quite high in backtesting.
All in all I think the backtester gives a good overview to check if a theory works.
Markus
Strategy tester seems to be accurate.
Quark
Quark
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