Testing of an Expert Advisor or Trading Robot
Testing the trading robot on - is extremely important activity, which is necessary for profitable automated work on the currency market. Of course, a trader can test his Expert Advisor on a demo account for weeks or months, but there are other options, simpler and faster. There is no need to wait for a month or more to test the reliability of a downloaded Expert Advisor, when everything can be done in a few minutes with the Strategy Tester in the trading terminal MetaTrader 4.
Where to test the trading robot for ?
As we said in the introduction to the article, test a trading robot for written in the mql language is possible with the strategy tester of the MetaTrader 4 terminal. There are a few steps you need to take to do this:
1. Download from the company's server an archive of quotations of the currency pair or instrument on which the text will be made. Select "Tools" in the upper menu, then in the appeared window - "Quotes archive" (or just press F2). In the window that appears press the + at the "Forex" tab and select the required currency pair and, if necessary, and timeframe. Press the "Upload" button and wait for the operation to complete.
2. Install the trading robot in the terminal, if it does not already exist.
3. Switch to the strategy tester. To do this, in the top menu, go to the tab "View" - "Strategy Tester" (keys Ctrl + R).
How to test an Expert Advisor?
4. After the strategy tester is on, we need to start test the trading advisor itself. Below the trading window of the currency pair appears trading robot testing servicewhere you should put the correct values for the test:
a. Choose the one we want advisor
b. Choose a currency pair for testing
c. set the time frame
d. check the "Use Date" box
e. set a date for the start of the test
f. specify a date for completing the test
g. Open the "Expert properties" tab, where you set the initial deposit, types of transactions, and the parameter to be optimized
h. in the "Optimization" tab make additional settings, if necessary
5. Press "Start", testing the trading robot will start immediately after you press it.
Note that it is additionally possible to enable "Visualization" or edit the robot (Edit Expert Advisor), but all these settings are at the trader's choice and are not mandatory for testing.
6. After testing is finished, a specific sound is heard from the terminal, it is possible to view the report, testing a trading robot for completed.
