Forex Megadroid and MT4 Strategy Tester

Beginner Questions
1

Hi everyone,

I am new to forex trading and still learning every day. I have not chosen a broker to go live with yet, but am testing 4 at the moment:

  1. AvaFX
  2. Trading Point
  3. Alpari
  4. FinFX

I am seeing some odd behaviour in the MT4 strategy tester. I first downloaded the historical data from the AvaFX MT4 platform.

I also downloaded the historical data for Trading Point and Alpari, but for some reason can’t download data from FinFX, it just keeps on saying there is no new data but the latest I can go back to is only a few weeks (from when I installed it). I had a live chat with the support people but that does not work either so I dropped it from the test.
Another problem I had with FinFx (I exported data from AVAFX and imported into FinFX) was that my Strategy tester never placed a trade over the entire period, not sure why.

For my test with the Megadroid I did the following:
Data range: 01/01/2008 - 01/01/2011
Droid settings: Lot = 0.1
Recovery= True
Aggressive=True
Risk = 0.05
Initial Deposit=1000

Once I completed my tests I thought I’d test all brokers with the same set of data. I copied data between platforms by doing:

  1. Export the data to a CSV within MT4 to a csv
  2. Go to the directory where my MT4 was installed and delete the demo and downloads directories under history
  3. Import my data set within MT4

I know there are some issues with backtesting and the validity of the data but to my surprise I got totally different results. In short, Megadroid did not do very well using the above method when executed when the data was not downloaded from the broker.

I may be paranoid here, but this makes me think that the data is made to fit the specific broker?

I am happy to post my results for all to see and will do so once my current tests are complete, hopefully over the weekend.

Would love to hear if anyone else did this sort of testing before and their findings.
The only reason I did this was to try and find out which broker will be the most profitable, but so far my test is not really working.

I am leaning towards AvaFX at the moment, but still have a couple of weeks of testing ahead of me I reckon!

Cheers

2

Doesn’t all of the data come from meta quotes?

3

I was hoping there would be 1 version of the truth, but either it is different or FMD works differently everytime when running a test over the same data/period.

4

All MT4 instances should be the same, at least in terms of the strategy tester. Have you tried using only one of the MT4 instances with the different data sources, so you only have one variable?

5

Thank you for the information. Good job. Keep it up

6

From my experience to test EA with strategy tester in MT4, I have try same EA on Alpari UK and IBFX, but the results are different. Because different brokers have different spreads and this is one of the factors that produce different results.