FocusForex  |  SEP 2007

Forex Focus by Patrick Nouvion

Forex Focus by Patrick Nouvion Backtesting And Forex Does backtesting produce valid results for foreign exchange trading? Here’s a study that answers this question. For many years, backtesting and simulations have been banished from my toolbox. I only use these tools as debuggers and I never look at the results. I have told people that backtesting is useless without actual historical tick data, and only a dreamer would believe all these simulation reports. I just got my hands on historical tick data from my broker, so I thought I would do some testing. I decided to check to see if I was wrong in steering people clear of backtesting and overoptimized systems. Or was I right in assuming that without historical tick data, simulations were a waste of time? The first thing I did was choose a system to test. The moving average convergence/divergence (MACD) sample that comes by default with MetaTrader is available for free and everyone who uses MetaTrader has access to it. Using the default settings on the MACD sample, I ran a simulation on a oneminute chart of EUR/USD from January 1, 2002, to April 1, 2007, using every tick option (Figure 1). The results are displayed in Figure 2.

by Patrick S. Nouvion