One more try…

Ok, I thought I’m not going to touch forex for a while… cos I can’t find any system with good odds…. Anyway, today, for no particular reason… I opened MT4 again… I think I just wanted to check the USDSGD rates…. but I’ve decided to write any EA… this time, I use the most basic definition of trends to try and program a scalping system… higher highs, higher lows….

Strategy Tester Produces Vastly Different Results

I tested my EA on two different laptops and was totally perplexed by the vastly different results. On my Acer running Vista, I get a profit of …… drum roll pls…… 215562.22! On my eeePC running Linux, I get only 46772.18….. about 5 times different.

I analysed the two result files and soon realised that the historical data used for testing differs on the two laptops, even though they were both downloaded from Alpari. I have no idea why the discrepancy… and which is a better reflection of my EA’s earning power…. Anyway, I reinstalled the data file on both laptops, using exactly the same procedure… and re-tested the EA… This time, the results were the same…. So, can I consider problem solved?

Maybe not… Cos I have yet to test the EURUSD pair, since I was unable to download the zip file from Alpari just now… seems like the server’s down…..

In addition, I remember my EA caused MT4 to crash when I tested it on a third laptop, running Windows XP…. but I’m going to ignore this at the moment, cause I highly suspect the crash is due to the limited virtual memory on that laptop… I’m not quite prepared to run the test on that 512MB RAM laptop again….. the frustration…

Ok, so, what to do now?

1) Download EURUSD from Alpari and test again….
2) Set up a forex and a VPS account to forward test the EA
3) Try running the EA on a forth laptop and see what happens. The EA is a bit ‘dangerous’, cause it produced too extremely difficult results…. It’s not robust… so how much can I trust the Backtesting results?????