Backtesting in MT4

Hey all

Can someone help me out here?

I've read tutorials and still getting the "squeak" noise with no results/trade actions.

I load up the EA, make sure its on "every tick for most accurate" and click "start". I get the squeak noise but no results.

Looking @ the journal theres an error which says

-Test Generator: unmatched data error (high value 1.5894 at 2010.11.17 03:00 is not reached from the least timeframe, high price 1.5884 mismatches)

-Test Generator: unmatched data error (volume limit 115 at 2011.03.07 23:00 exceeded)

Now I've Google'd but solutions I've found ovbiously haven't worked.

Could someone help me out and point directly ot the likely cause of this?

Is it the broker?

Thanks for reading, hope you can help!

Go to Visual mode and try a different date range. Very often recent data (less than 3 days old) is not available. Data older than 2 months is usually not available either. If that doesn't work, try different timeframes starting with the lower. Sometimes that forces the tester to obtain data. Or try a different currency pair if possible.


As far as the errors go, they are very common strategy tester errors. It is a data quality issue, nothing to do with the code. If it is a concern you could try another broker's data or download data from the history center. For my purposes, I just ignore it. For Renko, it might be more critical, and there is a good discussion about remedies on that thread.

Here is the best explanations I could find for each of the errors. These are opinions, but they seem reasonable.

Basically, the data for a longer time period such as H1 doesn't fit with the data for a smaller time period - e.g. the high or low implied by the 60 individual M1 bars for an hour doesn't match the high/low for the equivalent H1 bar.


http://forum.mql4.com/20934

If you are using "every tick mode", it looks at lower timeframes and generates a pseudo tick file.
In this case, the volume numbers on the lower timeframe, when added up, don't match the volume numbers
of the higher timeframe.

http://forum.mql4.com/14612

One can setup MT4 to use actual tick data of good quality for backtesting. It however requires quite a bit of work to setup. Instructions and scripts can be found here:
http://eareview.net/tick-data

Ps. It is probably best to do the above in a separate copy of MT4 that is would use purposfully for backtesting. Just copy your MT4 folder to a new folder and run terminal.exe