The effectiveness of the strategy tester.

Having purchased or downloaded an advisor for automatic trading for free, you immediately want to check its performance and find out whether the robot can really bring profit without the participation of a trader.

Testing on a real account is quite risky, so it is recommended to use a strategy tester for these purposes.
You can launch it in the trader’s terminal by simply clicking the “View” button in the top menu - Strategy Tester.

The program provides the opportunity to run the advisor on a historical period; you set the testing time yourself - a year, a month, or one day.

As a result, you receive a report on open transactions, their profitability and the overall financial result; the statistics are quite detailed, which allows you to draw some conclusions about the work of the advisor. How accurate are the results obtained and is it possible to evaluate the purchased advisor based on them?

Having tested several dozen advisors, I came to the conclusion that in most cases the tester can only answer the following questions:

• Script performance - some advisors only work in the terminals of certain brokers.

It is also difficult in real life to test robots that rarely open transactions, but the tester easily copes with this task. • Trading strategy - thanks to the tester, you can clearly see how the script works, when and how many trades it opens.

• Profitable direction - the reports indicate the percentage of profitable and unprofitable transactions depending on their direction; this fact can be used when running the advisor on a real account.

• Risk level - if an advisor lost a deposit on a strategy tester, then you can rest assured that he will do the same on a real account.

• Settings - using additional settings you can quickly check how the advisor reacts to their changes, thereby increasing its effectiveness on real accounts.

Whatever amazing results you get in the strategy tester, it is advisable to always use cent accounts , the risk of losses is much lower here, but the script works on a real account.