strategy backtesting steps

[Katarina Terzic]

Could you please explain how you conduct backtesting for trading strategies and how you determine when it's the right time to start live trading?

[Sergey Golubev]

All (not yet) about Strategy Tester, Optimization and Cloud - the summary thtead

MetaTrader 5 Help → Algorithmic Trading, Trading Robots → Strategy Testing

and this article: Testing trading strategies on real ticks

[Fernando Carreiro]

Your topic has been moved to the section: Expert Advisors and Automated Trading
Please consider which section is most appropriate — https://www.mql5.com/en/forum/172166/page6#comment_49114893

[Lorentzos Roussos]

Katarina Terzic:
Could you please explain how you conduct backtesting for trading strategies and how you determine when it's the right time to start live trading?

Some ideas :

Use MT5

• Backtest using custom scores evaluating the quality of each signal at first.Take all signals based on the signal criteria alone in this pass ignore margins equities and amount of trades 

For example in a normal run of the mill backtest you see max trades and signal parameters together (and other things) . If your system happens to hit max trades in a backtest run then you are taking no more signals. The signals you are missing could be good or bad and by not seeing them you are not selecting improvement or preventing possible dissaster.

The best way to do this is download tick data using metaquote's provisions on MT5 , pack it up into signals with a score and run your test on that data,

Be careful with the scoring method though, strategy tester is using a genetic algorithm.

• Then backtest the optimized signal for entries and management of trades normally as you would initially.