MT5 EA Backtests vs Live Results. What Am I Missing?

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For anyone trading with IC Markets or Pepperstone, how are you getting your live results to line up with what you see in backtesting?

I’ve built several bots that look profitable when I backtest them on MT5 real tick data. I’ve spent weeks testing, tweaking the logic, and refining the code, and the backtests look solid. But when I run the same EAs on a live demo, the performance is nowhere near what the backtest shows.

I understand that market conditions change, but this has been consistent for weeks now, so I feel like something else is going on.

Is MT5 tick data actually reliable for brokers like IC Markets? How do you properly backtest EAs using real, accurate market data instead of MT5’s simulated ticks? And what do you do to narrow the gap between backtest and live results?

 
salemtrading5:

For anyone trading with IC Markets or Pepperstone, how are you getting your live results to line up with what you see in backtesting?

I’ve built several bots that look profitable when I backtest them on MT5 real tick data. I’ve spent weeks testing, tweaking the logic, and refining the code, and the backtests look solid. But when I run the same EAs on a live demo, the performance is nowhere near what the backtest shows.

I understand that market conditions change, but this has been consistent for weeks now, so I feel like something else is going on.

Is MT5 tick data actually reliable for brokers like IC Markets? How do you properly backtest EAs using real, accurate market data instead of MT5’s simulated ticks? And what do you do to narrow the gap between backtest and live results?

Forum on trading, automated trading systems and testing trading strategies

How to perform a backtesting, equivalent to the real trading.

Sergey Golubev, 2020.04.08 07:35

MT5 - Testing trading strategies on real ticks and the explanation is on this post.

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Testing trading strategies on real ticks - the article

If you need the most accurate representation of history data in the strategy tester, use "Every tick based on real ticks" mode. In this mode, the tester downloads real ticks from a broker's trade server and uses them to display the price development. In case real ticks are absent for some time intervals, the tester simulates the price just like in the "Every tick" mode. Thus, if the broker has all history of the required symbols, you can perform testing of real historical data without artificial modeling. The drawback of the mode is a significant increase in test time as shown in the comparison table above.

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