A demo platform that would let you simulate trades in the past?

[Lakontis]

I was thinking, what’s the point of spending all those weeks and months trading demo accounts with live prices? If you trade short term, 15-30 minute charts, wouldn’t it be much more efficient to simply scroll back a few months, zoom in to 15 minute chart and trade those? Simply place the trade in your head at certain time and price in the chart using your strategy (plus the stop and limit), then instead of waiting for many hours of real time trading, simply fast forward the chart a few hours and see whether the price hit your stop or your limit.
Wouldn’t that be much more efficient way to practice? If so, is there some kind of program that would be able to do that? Let you open a trade at any time in the past and close it whenever you want?
Thanks.

[Master_Tang]

I did that for a while, and found it somewhat helpful.

But forward testing is irreplaceable.
Funny things happen when you see the candles actually forming in a tick by tick fashion in real time.

What you perceive is occurring for the first five minutes of a 15 minute candle, may completely change by the end of it, and change your mind as well.

Plus, forward testing helps you build patience.

A necessary ingredient in successful trading.

[Lakontis]

I’d still like to do that for a while while waiting on my real time trades. What kind of tools did you use to do that? Did you actually use some kind of special program for that or simply looked at the past time charts and trade on paper?

[Master_Tang]

I did it mostly on weekends when there was no live trading. I used the F12 button on MT4.

I think it was SweetPip that has posted an offline EA for MT4 that allows you to make trades, as well as goes tick by tick, as long as the information is there for the currency of choice.

[Lakontis]

I did it mostly on weekends when there was no live trading. I used the F12 button on MT4.

I think it was SweetPip that has posted an offline EA for MT4 that allows you to make trades, as well as goes tick by tick, as long as the information is there for the currency of choice.

Can you tell more about paper trading on MT4? I mostly use FXCM trading platform so I am unfamiliar with MT4. How do I use the EA to simulate backward trading? Do you still have it?
I’d really appreciate it.

[Master_Tang]

I didn’t really try hard to get it working, but the instructions in the pdf are quite clear.

Here you go.

Thanks Swee P, and o9901mh!

Trading simulator

Here it is…I got it from o9901mh (that macguyver guy )

Setup PDF

Installer

Files

It does have a few limitations such as if any indicators you use are multiframed, they won’t work well if at all. Also you can’t change timeframes while trading. It has scripts for market orders and pending stop orders but not limit orders…or at least I haven’t figured it out if it does.

Otherwise it’s great even if it’s just to watch price action which you can speed up or slow down, and for whatever price history you have available to you.

[Lakontis]

Thanks a lot!