Testing of advisors.

Many beginning traders are drawn to automated Forex trading. It seems simple enough: download your favorite advisor and start trading. However, to be confident of success and protect your deposit, you need to test your chosen advisors.

Advisor testing can be carried out in three variants, each of which has its own strengths and weaknesses.

1. Test on a demo account

This is the simplest option, and it's what most inexperienced traders initially resort to. At first glance, the advantages are obvious: there's no need to risk real money, and you can choose any deposit size.

However, the biggest drawback is the time involved: there's no guarantee that the advisor will trade with the same profitability over a week, a month, or even longer. Therefore, the second option is more appealing.

2. Testing Forex advisors on the strategy tester

The main advantage is the ability to use any period of available quotes downloaded from the data server for analysis.

Surprisingly, the testing process itself is quite simple—it requires just a few simple steps.

At the top of the trading terminal, select the "View" tab in the "Strategy Tester" submenu that opens. A window with settings and results displays appears at the bottom of the screen.

Now we move on to the main settings:

- Advisor – select the desired advisor.
- Symbol – currency pair on which testing is carried out.
- Model – use all ticks.
- Use date – set the period for which data will be taken for testing the advisor.
- Period – forex timeframe , at your discretion.
- Spread – spread size, for more complete reliability it is advisable to select the current one.

• Launch – click on start and wait for the results, which will be displayed on such tabs as - “Results”, “Chart”, “Report”.
If in the report “Tick modeling quality” is below 90%, you need to load quotes. This is done quite simply - Top menu - Tools - Quote archive. In the window that opens, select the desired instrument and click load. Then test the advisors again.

Before conducting tests, the script you need must already be installed in the trader's trading terminal, the installation process is described in the article “ Installing an Advisor ”.

The disadvantage of this method is that some advisors behave differently on a real account than during testing, so for testing purposes, it is recommended to additionally use the following option.

3. On cent accounts.

It's all very simple: open a cent account , deposit a few dozen dollars, and off you go.

If you're satisfied with the results, you can upgrade to a different account type and increase your deposit size, which in turn increases your trading volume.