EA in Strategy tester placing positions that I don't have funds for...

[Alon D]

I'm testing an EA.

I noticed it sometimes opens positions (in strategy tester) with a volume much greater than my balance + leverage.

How is that possible?

I this screenshot I have 972 EUR balance and I'm using 1:30 leverage.

It opened a volume of 0.97 on GBPUSD. Meaning a 97,000 GBP position. What am I missing?

[Alain Verleyen]

Alon D:

I'm testing an EA.

I noticed it sometimes opens positions (in strategy tester) with a volume much greater than my balance + leverage.

How is that possible?

I this screenshot I have 972 EUR balance and I'm using 1:30 leverage.

It opened a volume of 0.97 on GBPUSD. Meaning a 97,000 GBP position. What am I missing?

Your leverage is clear not 1:30.

Check the parameters of your customer symbol.

[Alon D]

Alain Verleyen #:

Your leverage is clear not 1:30.

Check the parameters of your customer symbol.

I'm wondering if the EA found a bug in the strategy tester that allows it to open positions beyond the funds available to make it seem profitable during testing so people will buy it.

The author failed to reply to my question about it which only makes me more suspicious.

It's doing a lot of strange things with it's operations when I inspect it in visual mode. 

AccountInfoInteger(ACCOUNT_LEVERAGE)  is returning 30

[Alain Verleyen]

Alon D #:

I'm wondering if the EA found a bug in the strategy tester that allows it to open positions beyond the funds available to make it seem profitable during testing so people will buy it.

The author failed to reply to my question about it which only makes me more suspicious.

It's doing a lot of strange things with it's operations when I inspect it in visual mode. 

AccountInfoInteger(ACCOUNT_LEVERAGE)  is returning 30

Account leverage is one thing, but the actual leverage of a symbol is determined but some symbol's parameters. Check them.

Example:

[Alon D]

Alain Verleyen #:

Account leverage is one thing, but the actual leverage of a symbol is determined but some symbol's parameters. Check them.

Example:

I think I understand what's going on.

My broker gives me 1:30 leverage on a GBPUSD.

The notional margin is 3,914 eur/lot

The "calculation" property is set to "Forex no leverage".

Initially when I tested in the strategy tester with a leverage of 1:30 versus 1:1, it ignored it  and I saw no difference. I understood it's because of the "calculation" property.

So I created a custom symbol duplicated from the original GBPUSD symbol, but I changed the calculation to "Forex". Once I did that, the margin notional value changed automatically to 130 eur/lot.

I probably didn't need to do that. I should have kept it as "forex no leverage" and tested with a leverage of 1:1 since the 1:30 leverage was already implied in the original notional margin value.