Has anyone managed to produce believable results with MT4’s backtester?

I know that the Metatrader 4 strategy tester is limited, and that backtesting as a whole is an unreliable affair, but I never thought it would be this difficult to get a remotely accurate result. Can anyone tell me what I’m missing here?

I have been using with Metatrader 4 for the last three years, and have been writing and demo-testing expert advisors for most of that time. Every single time a new terminal build comes out, I try out the strategy tester, but I have yet to get a valid result (by valid, I mean a set of tester trades that very closely approximates actual demo account trades that the advisor has made over the same timeframe in a live test).

So far I have tried:

1. ·All three emulation models (including “every tick” at 90% quality)
2. ·About ten different data sources (Alpari’s Datacenter, Excel tick data found online, data gotten from MT4’s History Center using the “Download” button, etc.)
3. ·Using the period converter to translate 1M data into other timeframes
4. ·Various brokers' platforms
5. ·Older Metatrader builds
6. ·About a hundred different combinations of EA, timeframe, parameter, and testing date range, including EAs that trade on longer 4H-1D charts

My strategy tester, meanwhile, does one of the following:

1. ·Makes absolutely no trades, ever
2. ·Gives modeling quality below 90%
3. ·“Forgets” months of data at a time
4. ·Makes trades that seem legit, but actually have nothing to do with the live account results of the same EA over the same date range

And it seems that I’m not the only one who has this problem – whenever I visit a forum dedicated to EA development, I see other posters getting wildly different results by testing the same EAs on the same terminals with the same 90% modeling quality.

Sometimes I feel like I’m just feeding random numbers into a black-box random number generator that outputs some more random numbers and then stamps a big green 90% sticker on it, regardless of what it did. Can anyone relate?

my backtesting always giving me equal to live testing. 100% agreeing.
suggestion: use actual ticks for backtesting (not modeled ticks).
will solving your all problemos

I normally get the same results in backtest and in forward test but you need to have good historical data and also use as it was suggested the real ticks instead of the modeled ones. The open and close of the bars are real values. In between it is just a model. So try to base your Ea on the open close values of the candles it will help a lot.
about the issues you mentioned

1. Makes absolutely no trades, ever -> problem either in the EA or if your data in different time frames are incoherent
2. ·Gives modeling quality below 90% -> you dont have all M1 data on the time frame you test
3. ·“Forgets” months of data at a time -> seems that you have missing data

So it is quite possible that you have issues in the quality of data that you uses

hi,

what are you checking when you test a ea ?

Profit factor ?
Expected payoff ?

Hey, thanks for the help everyone, I'll try the tick-chart approach. Too bad the recalculate option is now gone though, I'll have to hunt down an older Metatrader build to test properly.

And as far as factors to test for - I didn't really put much thought into profit factor, drawdown, etc. yet, I'm only trying to fix the modeling first. You could say that I'm testing the tester.