A very quick but important note about MT4...
I was feeling pretty damn good about my mechanical system.... 21,000 pips from 1998-2010, with a max drawdown of only 883 pips.
Let me cut to through the chase:
I ran my backtester again today, only to find that my 21,000 had dropped to 14,000. All the settings were the same.... I could not figure it out. Same entries, same winning %, same number of trades....
"What the heck is this? Metatrader does what it wants to when it feels like it?"
But then it hit me.... The symbol properties had changed. The backtesting results from a few days ago were with a 0.6 pip spread and a positive swap on longs.... now, Alpari updated their spread to 3.6 pips for spread and a negative swap for both longs and shorts.
Factor that extra spread by 1,777 trades, and X longs, and you get a swing of -7000 pips. Ridiculous.
So there you have it: pips will change as the swaps and spreads change in the backtester. It should be noted that ANY backtest will only be accurate for the current state of the symbol properties.
I was feeling pretty damn good about my mechanical system.... 21,000 pips from 1998-2010, with a max drawdown of only 883 pips.
Let me cut to through the chase:
I ran my backtester again today, only to find that my 21,000 had dropped to 14,000. All the settings were the same.... I could not figure it out. Same entries, same winning %, same number of trades....
"What the heck is this? Metatrader does what it wants to when it feels like it?"
But then it hit me.... The symbol properties had changed. The backtesting results from a few days ago were with a 0.6 pip spread and a positive swap on longs.... now, Alpari updated their spread to 3.6 pips for spread and a negative swap for both longs and shorts.
Factor that extra spread by 1,777 trades, and X longs, and you get a swing of -7000 pips. Ridiculous.
So there you have it: pips will change as the swaps and spreads change in the backtester. It should be noted that ANY backtest will only be accurate for the current state of the symbol properties.