Testing of advisors.
Many novice traders are attracted by automatic trading on Forex; it would seem that nothing is simpler, download the advisor you like and trade to your health. But in order to be confident of success and not be afraid for your deposit, you need to test the selected advisors.
Testing of advisors can be carried out in three options, each of which has its own strengths and weaknesses.
1. Test on a demo account
The simplest option, this is what most inexperienced traders first resort to; at first glance, the advantages here are simply obvious - there is no need to risk real money, you can choose any deposit size.
But the biggest disadvantage in this case is time; there is no guarantee that the adviser will trade with the same profitability over a week, a month or a longer period. Therefore, the second option will be more interesting.
2. Testing Forex advisors on a strategy tester
The main advantage is the ability to use for analysis any period of available quotes that can be downloaded from the data server.
Surprisingly, the testing process itself is quite simple; to implement it, you need to perform several 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 output appears at the bottom of the screen. • Now let's move on to the main settings:
- Advisor – select the desired advisor.
- Symbol – the currency pair on which testing is carried out.
- Model – use all ticks.
- Use date – set the period for which data will be taken to test 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 that will be displayed on tabs such as “Results”, “Graph”, “Report”.
If the “Tick Modeling Quality” report is below 90%, you need to load quotes.
This is done quite simply – Top menu – Service – Quote archive. In the window that opens, select the desired tool and click load. Afterwards we test the advisors again. Before carrying out 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 Expert Advisor ”.
The disadvantage of this method is that some advisors do not behave exactly the same on a real account as during testing, so it is recommended to additionally use the following option for testing.
3. On cent accounts.
Everything is more than simple here, open a cent account , deposit a couple of tens of dollars into it and off you go.
If the results are quite satisfactory, you can change the account type and increase the size of the deposit, and with it the volume of transactions.