How to backtest news events (spread)?

Hello,

I want to trade the news, so im trying to use the Strategy tester,

Will it remmber the spread changes during the release of news?

Thanks

You can’t really, and you’re going into too much detail, you wont gain anything by researching it, it’s quite surprising how little news events actually effect the market except for NFP and interest rate changes and a couple of others.

No ,
i mean
lets say i had an open position , a long position at 9:30 , just at the news release time , and the spread went 30 , and my stop loss was 20 , will the strategy tester show me that i got trapped into the spread change ?
I mean , will the spread change during the news events effect my trades in the strategy tester ? ( how does it calucate the spread while testing ) ?
Thanks again , i hope you got my point

No, it won’t.

I agree with Purple, but he didn’t answer all your questions. Using Strategy Tester for any kind of back testing is full of pitfalls. It can be useful to gain insight and for practice, but as far as obtaining accurate results, it isn’t possible. For one thing, the spread is taken from the current spread used by your broker. So for instance on the weekend, if your broker’s spread is set at 20 pips, Strategy Tester will use 20 pips.

Also remember, Strategy Tester is not using tick data - it uses interpolated 1M data which tries to emulate the arrival of ticks, but is ultimately unreliable. Also remember that requotes and slippage will not be reflected in back testing, but these could have a big effect in real trading.

As far as developing a strategy for news events - don’t. There simply aren’t enough opportunities to practice with and to exploit. Try something like the London open if you want big moves that happen regularly.

Great , Thanks for the information,
im trying to gain 1/2 of wt i lose , 40 pips profit and 20 loss ,
do you think 20 pips loss is safe enough for the biggest news events if the chart goes as my order (profit ) ?
im using oanda , and during the last week , the max spread was 10-15 i guess …

When i was researching trading around news events, i found it was impossible to back test. At least anyway feasible. I also used forex tester 2 and tried to look up dates of old events and piece it together. it was not good enough. The only way I was able to collect reliable data on news events is to trade them while they occur.