Expert Advisors To Define Forex Trading Strategies Under Test

Expert Advisors will be supported as a means to define Forex trading strategies under test in the next major release of the Smart Forex Tester. We are already working on that important new feature.

To give you some background, Smart Forex Tester is natively working with trading strategies defined as text-based state machines. We have developed a simple price action strategy example that illustrates how it is working.

But for some users, expert advisors are more familiar tool so it makes sense to add such option to the Smart Forex Tester. How can we do that?

First of all, let’s note that we can’t use the Expert Advisors in binary format (i.e. .ex4 – files). This is virtually prohibited by the Metatrader’s license. Without doing reverse engineering (which is out of question, of course), we can only test binary EAs if we have access to a Metatrader server. Which is just too costly for this purpose.

Fortunately, this is not a show stopper. If we define our own strategy that we want tested, we must have access to the source code. This is doable.

Expert Advisors Put Into The Sandbox

We will be using Expert Advisors normally in their “native habitat” – Metatrader. But we will replace all function calls that manipulate quotes and orders with our own functions. Other functions can work with Metatrader normally.

Expert Advisors In Smart Forex Tester
How Expert Advisors can be used with Smart Forex Tester

So we can see that Expert Advisors will be sand-boxed. After that, you can run the trading strategy tests like you normally do.

How to prepare the Expert Advisor for the test? You can open it in any text editor and made a context search-replace. We might also provide a simple tool for doing that.

Subscribe to be updated on the current development status.

More details will be provided at expertadvisortest.com.

Automated trading strategy tested: 132 pips in one day, 60% winning trades

Quick link: Download Smart Forex Tester

You are probably aware of the sharp drop in the EURUSD on October, 21. Following the ECB announcement, the Euro fell over 2% against the Dollar.

It happened so that on that day we were testing the latest version of Smart Forex Tester. This upcoming release of our software will support forward testing – i.e. test the automated trading strategies on live data feed. For that, we have developed a special Expert Advisor that sends tick data from Metatrader.

So, we were running the stability test. We were using our automated trading strategy (comes bundled with with Smart Forex Tester). We left the tester running on its own. When we checked it the next day, we were stunned. Not by the fact that the tester was still up and running (this was expected).

automated trading strategy Real Time Test with Smart Forex Tester
Smart Forex Tester runs automated trading strategy in real time (click to enlarge)

What came as a surprise was that our automated strategy absolutely crashed it! It did 27 trades, out of which 60% were winners. And it raked 132 pips profit!

Automated trading is the way to go!

This test convinced us again that automated trading can be made profitable. We understand, that for this simple strategy that we were using, we had a bit of luck. The reason being that this strategy doesn’t yet have a trend following algorithm. We are only developing it.

But still – as we have written on many occasions – we see not a single reason not to use automated trading. E.g. ckeck our post comparing Smart Forex Tester with manual Forex trading simulator.

Our line of reasoning is simple. First, to be successful, a Forex trader must have a clearly formalized strategy. Second, this strategy has to be strictly followed. No room for emotions. Now, if we have done the former – guess who will be more successful in the latter – a person or a computer? The answer is obvious.

If you are interested  – stay tuned! Download Smart Forex Tester and  wait for the announcement of the latest release.