Causes of EA Backtesting Problems and its solutions
Backtesting is the technique that is used to find profitability and drawdown of an EA, we use a strategy tester in MT4 and MT5, the only difference between MT4 and MT5 strategy tester is MT5 strategy tester supports fast optimization (To find suitable input parameters for profitable trade by an EA) and multiple pairs backtesting at a time.
The backtesting failure may occur in many ways, some of the main key points, I would like to discuss are mentioned below.
Backtesting Might be disabled by the EA developer
The EA might be using the IsTesting() function in the backend, which can be set as True or false so that the user can or cannot backtest during some conditions.
Licensing Protection
Backtesting failure can also occur if you're using some premium EAs, which you don't have a full license key or file to use all functionalities properly, the only solution to handle this situation is to contact the developer or organization to buy the license or testing trial.
Invalid Stop Value
Stoploss minimum or least value depends on instruments and varies on different pairs you're testing, Error 130 is the most common error you will face if you put invalid stops. this means that the stop loss you're trying to put for the test is incorrect and is need to be re-input to correct or qualify the actual values.
Bad modeling quality data
One other sort of backtesting situation that can be very risky in terms of real-time trading is bad modeling quality data during backtesting that causes a large number of mismatch errors, this happens when Data of the least timeframe does not correspond with data of the tested timeframe.
To overcome the situation you need high-quality data which is available on the internet with accurate OHLC prices and else you can also go with a premium version of Tick data suite or any other backtesting software that supports MT4 extension.
EA that uses DLL
Some of the EAs are using DLL libraries for their extraordinary performance by interacting with systems API, that type of EA requires DLL necessary to run and backtest. These types of errors are generally prompted in Journal Tab by "Expert Stopped" or "DLL not allowed".
You can enable it by common option when running your EA and also on options area.
Optimization Problem
During optimization of an EA, we checked with multiple timeframes and a combination of different input parameters to find the highest profit giving by coded strategy, the problem we can find during optimization is sometimes it uses cached optimization settings, this would be very incompatible in the case you will get same failed results much time.
Technical Problems
Many times the Expert advisor is written in a way that causes some sort of logical errors, during compilation it successfully compiles but when it comes to running the EA it fails to take any trades during market trading hours.
You can report the Bug to the owner for this sort of Mistake.
Metatrader Updated Version Compatibility
Metatrader comes up with several different updates in a year, during this update many bugs fix and previous technical errors and syntax errors obsolete in the way the problem can be with the strategy tester, either you’re trying to backtest the latest EA with Old strategy tester or the latest terminal with an old terminal.
The only solution is to update the terminal properly to run the EA.
News Filter and Web Requests
Many Latest EA uses a new filter which uses web request to interact with the news website, some the Expert advisors depend on news filter for finding the best pattern, these news filter features will not work properly in the Strategy tester.
In this way, the EA would not work properly and will not give accurate results. There is no perfect way to find accurate results.
The difference in Modeling Type
MT4/MT5 provides three levels of modeling types Every Tick data, Control Points, and Open Prices Only, the first method is mostly used by every expert advisor, and the other two expert advisors are based on Open prices and Control Points, these methods are rare and some explicitly programming approaches used to run this modeling type.
Maybe you’re using Open prices modeling where Every tick data is need to be used because every type of EA is not able to run on the other twos modeling type approaches.
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