How to Use the MetaTrader Strategy Tester

The Strategy Tester, in five lines

The Strategy Tester is the panel in MetaTrader that replays old bars for an Expert Advisor, a program that trades by written rules. View, Strategy Tester, or Ctrl+R, opens it along the bottom. The Settings tab asks for the program, the symbol, the period, the dates and the starting deposit. Visual mode, with its speed slider, lets you watch the bars go by. Start runs it, and three tabs say what happened: Graph draws the balance, Results lists every trade, Report adds them up. The example throughout is a plain rule on the euro, buy at 10:00 and sell at 18:00 every weekday, run over 2 March to 4 September 2026 at 0.10 lot, where a lot is 100,000 units of the currency.

A turntable with a speed switch

Picture a turntable with a speed switch. The record is the old bars, cut before you sat down and unchangeable. The needle is the program, reading each groove as it comes round. The switch is the speed slider: slow, and you watch every bar arrive; fast, and six months play in a minute. The switch changes how fast the record plays and never what is on it, which is the whole point of the tester. A program that would have bought at 10:00 on 25 August buys at 10:00 on 25 August whether the run takes a minute or an afternoon.

This paper is locked