Tester Mode
The Meta Extender offers an intriguing use case beyond trading with a live or demo account on the current chart. It can also be used within the MetaTrader strategy tester. Given that the user interface remains fully operational while being executed with the strategy tester, you can practice manual trading in a time-lapse with the help of the strategy tester.
Combining the Meta Extender with the MetaTrader strategy tester allows you to simulate an entire trading day in just 10 minutes. You also have the flexibility to adjust the speed of the simulation to speed up or slow down that simulation.
Open strategy tester
To explore this feature further, please navigate to View - Strategy Tester to open the MetaTrader strategy tester.
You will notice a new window appearing at the bottom of your MetaTrader. While the strategy tester is typically used to test fully automated trading strategies, you will now learn to use it for practicing manual trading. This feature could be used to revisit the previous week to practice understanding the latest market behavior in a calm moment, such as on a Sunday evening, or for educational purposes when you want to teach and explain trading to someone on an actively changing chart. Indeed, analyzing a historical chart can be challenging. In retrospect, anyone can place the perfect trade and become a billionaire within weeks. In practice, it's different. With the strategy tester, you can learn on historical charts with the feeling of an unknown future.
Configure tester settings
Next, please ensure that both Long & Short positions are permitted to be opened. To do this, navigate to Expert properties and verify the Positions setting under the Testing tab.
Within this window, you can also set your Initial deposit and the currency of your test trading account. Setting the initial deposit to a realistic value that aligns with your intended trading budget is advised. Generally, the larger the equity of a trading account, the lower the relative risk for trading. In other words, practicing proper risk and money management with insufficient equity becomes challenging. It is recommended to start with at least 1000 Euros (or the equivalent in your trading currency).
Practice trading in timelapse
The other strategy tester setting shall be configured as follows:
- Expert: FEA Trading\MT4\Meta Extender
- Symbol: Any symbol from your market view
- Period: Any period
- Spread: Either Current or the typical spread offered by your broker for the symbol you have chosen. You can find it in the market view.
- Model: Ever tick
- Use date: Yes
- From: Any
- To: Any
- Visual mode: Yes
For the start and end date, you can select any period you wish to simulate, but be aware that the MetaTrader 4 historical data is only available for a short historical period. Once everything is configured, press the Start button and use the Meta Extender.
You'll notice that the simulation can time-lapse a day within 10 minutes. If you want to slow down, you can adjust the execution speed with the provided slider in the tester settings.
Check out automatically generated journal
When utilizing the Meta Extender in tester mode, the journal is generated independently from its usage on a live chart. To access the trading journals for the strategy tester, navigate to the data folder by selecting File, then Open Data Folder, and proceed to the application folder.
\tester\files\FEA Trading\Meta Extender 2.0\Journal
The raw output of the trading journal is a CSV file, which can be imported into the pre-prepared Excel journal file.
To import the trading journal data, open the Excel file and press Import. The Journal Diagram sheet provides access to various diagrams, such as the equity over time diagram.
It requires installing Microsoft Excel on your computer and enabling the macro feature. Excel will prompt for this when opening the Journal Evaluation file for the first time. Please enable the content. If you are missing the evaluation Excel file, you can download it here.