About Us > News Centre > Forex Currents Newsletter > February 2012 > How to backtest your EA with the T3 Integration Bridge

How to backtest your EA with the T3 Integration Bridge

While creating your own EA can be a very powerful tool in the arsenal of a forex trader, properly back-testing it is a vital step, one made easier with tools you already have at your disposal.

Nowadays almost everyone can create their own EAs. There are a lot of benefits trading with EAs. It can help avoid fear, greed, anxiety and other emotional factors that might affect your trading performance. It’s also more accurate to document and record your trading activities and strategies.

Although trading with EAs can potentially bring huge profit, not every EA is constantly profitable. You have to do a lot of back-testing to make sure your account survives under various market conditions. In this article we will show you how to back-test your EA with the Fair Trading Technology T3 Integration Bridge.

Step 1 - Open your MT4 client, Open the Strategy Tester under View (or CTRL+R).

Strategy Tester

Step 2 - Specify your testing range

Now you should be able to see the Strategy Tester under the Terminal:

Testing range

Here you can specify how you’d like to back-test your EAs. Select the EA you want to test with, make sure you choose the right currency pair, the right time frame and range. (For certain EAs you can change some of the variables under “Expert properties”, such as your stop loss, take profit, and percentage of risk per trade, all depending on how the EA has been coded.)

Once you have all the conditions and variables ready, click “Start” to begin the test.

Step 3 - Analyze the result

Now we have the result. You can either view it in the MT4 client or save it as a report.

Ea performance graph

This graph shows the performance of the EA.

EA factors

This charts shows all factors of this EA. Pay attention to won percentage for both short and long trades. You will usually find ideas how to improve your EA.

One of the advantages of trading with an EA using the T3 Integration Bridge is that the tick data on our MT4 is from Dukascopy Bank SA, the biggest liquidity provider in the world.