Or you can go for forward testing that I feel is a better approach @collinggwoodabram since we get to test the strategy in real time rather than the historical data. Nothing works better than the confidence of strategy working well.
Optimizing a system and watching the theoretical results perk up with just a few tweaks, seems interesting to me.
@outhoe you might just end up over-testing or curve fitting buddy and that’s not good. You’d simply optimize the system to 100% profitability on the historical data. Do you think the trading will be that much accurate?
Go for the back testing if you wish. Keep focusing on the key performance metrics like the profitable percentage, the net profit on average trade, and always aim for a realistic success rate.
I think what you’re saying is right. Reliable trading platforms like fxview, oanda, avatrade offer a simulated environment to complete the forward performance testing. I usually practice placing trades and get acquainted with the platform’s user interface to better the strategies.
One piece of advice here- look for a correlation between the out-of-sample, in-sample, and forward testing results. The better the correlation, more confident you’d be of developing the viable trading system.
Don’t know how oanda works but I’ve been trading with fxpro and fxview and the online quotes and interactive charts help examine the quotes in detail. It’s easy to respond to any price change quickly.
Just started using MT4. The problem is that I have multiple monitors, so can I separate charts from the terminals to the price charts of other monitors?
Well I don’t think that’s possible. I mean you can’t take the chart out of the terminal. I think they go hand in hand.