Important note about Metatrader *Should be a sticky

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.

My results were as high as 26,000 pips a week ago, but I thought I inadvertently changed some configuration that caused the drop down to 21,000.

Only after a second time did I start to get perturbed with MT4.

That is a swing of 12,000 pips over 13 years. You can never win with spreads and rollover, though you can get royally screwed when they get bad.



Lesson learned: Find a broker (like CitiFX Pro or DBFX) with a stable spread, low markup swaps, and a credible name to keep you in the game.

I concur. Couldn't have said it better myself.

those commercial EAs actually tell their customers to backtest their EAs during stable spread times else the results will not be accurate... how ironic...