Sunday, February 3, 2013

Shocking Truths About Forex Robot Back Tests And Forward Tests




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Brutal Truth FREE Report that exposes everything about forex robots. Retail
forex market has been swarmed with forex robots. Everyday you will find a new forex robot being launched with a
lot of fanfare and tall claims. Now an important question that should come to anyone's mind is that can you trust
the screeshots shown on a forex robot website?
Most of these websites have been designed solely for the purpose of marketing and selling that robot. Almost all
these websites talk about Back Test Results. Let's discuss what these back test results mean.
A back test is done when you use historical data to test the performance of any automated system or what you
call a trading robot. Now suppose you have historical data about say one of the popular currency pair GBPUSD.
You can back test the robot and see how well it could have performed over that period of six months.
Now a good back test can only be an indication that this robot can work. It doesn't mean that it will as a back test
simply ignores spreads and slippage. For example, the spread maybe 2 pips during the day but it might widen to 5
pips in the night.
It all depends on the liquidity in the market. At the time of news release, spreads can widen as much as 20 pips.
So what's use a back test is when it simply ignores these important factors that are present in live trading. Some
robots cannot be back tested. This is another limitation.
Now, most of the time you will be told that you can test that robot on your demo account. Demo account testing is
also known as Forward Testing. But here again there are limitations as demo trading is not live trading and there
are many differences between the two.
Demo accounts behave differently than live accounts. You should know this. In demo trading, you are using virtual
money or fake money. This is one difference. Let me explain how this makes a difference. When you buy and sell,
the broker has to find someone who can take the opposite position. This is known as offsetting.
This is done automatically through the broker's trading server. Now this is not instantaneouly. It can take
sometime. In some cases, it is impossible to find someone to take the opposite position to your buy or sell order.
So what is possible on a demo account may not be possible on a live account. So what gets executed on a demo
account maynot get executed on a live account. The only test of a forex robot is live trading.

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