Forex strategy testing – as any other testing – is impossible without proper tools and methodics.
Take a look at the results of our poll – it shows that many think that in testing Forex, historical data quality is a top priority. We can’t agree more.
Loading ...But what is the quality market data? First of all, it must be real quotes. For this reason, we can’t be satisfied in MetaTrader approach, where tick data is not real but is instead interpolated from M1 data. This makes the quotes artificially smooth so it can result in incorrect testing results.
We only use real interbank tick quotes for testing. Where to download such data?
Excellent source of Forex historical data is TrueFX. They provide high quality quotes archive since 2009 and they also provide streaming quotes for 15 currency pairs.
Even better news is that the market data is free! You only need to register with them. We use their data and recommend you download your copy.
The latest release of our Smart Forex Tester works with the TrueFX quotes.
Each data file has one month of tick data. You can open it in the Smart Strategy Tester, and then split it and save as smaller files (e.g. a week each).