I have an EA I’m working on and I want to run it through the strategy tester but I need (yawn) 90% modelling quality. Can someone please point me in the direction of the best (most realistic) tick data. PLEASE
I’ve tried in vain to find this data.
Please don’t send me here, alpari-idc.com/en/dc/databank.html or tell me to scroll my metatrader charts back.
As far as I know all MT brokers get their historical data from Metaqoutes (the guys that make MT), so I’d contact them and ask how to get data that will give 90% quality.
I don’t think browsing around a bunch of broker demos will help but that’s a guess, not something I’m sure of.
Why won’t Alpari’s tick data work? It should be just as accurate as any other data??
you can’t download it anymore
Get an Alpari demo account and go to the MT4 History Center, select your pair, and hit download. It will download the Alpari data all the way back to 1999. 
I assumed he had already tried that. You see, sometimes I’ll get a pretty low modelling quality even though I’ve done everything correctly (as far as I can tell).
When it comes to downloading through the history center, Alpari seems to beat the rest when it comes to how far back you can go.
If Oanda wasn’t so great, I’d probably go with Alpari…
Are you running the period_converter script to compile the data in all the different time frames?
If you do that you should get 90% quality every time!
Here’s a tutorial… MetaTrader Strategy Tester – Part 2 | metatrader.info
I’ll try that thanks, although I think I tried it before
Period converter huh? I had no idea that it had a use in back testing. Thanks a bunch for the tip Phil. I thought you did all your back testing the hard way, but I see that you have an ace up your sleeve 
I do it the hard way now, but I went through a massive EA phase when I was new, so I know all the backtesting tricks!
I can get 90% quality if I use the M5 timeframe but it’s still only 25% on M1
Am I missing something?
Does the M5 mean the expert only executes once every 5 minutes or is it still on every tick?
I don’t believe you can get higher than 25% on 1M charts.
The reason is that MT4 doesn’t really have “tick” data. It may call it tick data, but it’s 1M data. The strategy tester has no clue what’s going on for 59 seconds of every minute, so it can’t test 1M systems very well.