Hey Everyone…I’m new to the forex market but i have reading and learning as much as i possibly can about it for the past 2 months…I read Rob Bookers book “Adventures of a Currency Trader” which i thought was an informative and at times comical look at the life of a forex player. Anyway, I am startign to develop a coupel strategies that are working for me in my practice accounts but I cannote figure out how to do backtesting which would save me a TON of time and help me to refine my strategy. Any tips on how to backtest would be greatly appreciated (especially a step by step guide of how to do it using MetaTrader 4). Thanks in advance and I really appreciate the abundance of information that this forum has on it. 
IMO backtesting via an automated strategy tester is ineffective. You won’t really know anything about your strategy by testing it that way.
Best bet for you is to scroll back in MT4 as far back as you want/can and then tick forward one bar at a time…press f12.
By doing this you can recreate the live trading atmosphere. Trade your strategy as you have created it and see how it woks out on that.
If you get good results moving one bar at a time then take it live with a small account.
If your really wanna auto-backtest then just google it. I’m sure there’s a tutorial somewhere.
Thanks Virtecs…appreciate the info…i’m going to try out the tick by tick method.
I agree with Virtecs. Automated testing is worthless because all it tells you is the results. If you scroll back and test it yourself you an get an idea why a strategy is working or not, and you can get ideas on how to make the strategy better.