MetaQuotes has announced a release of their long-awaited Strategy Tester tool for MetaTrader 5 Forex trading platform. It’s available in the build 268 (and higher) of the platform (it can be downloaded for free if you still haven’t done so). It’s still in a beta version and needs a lot of work on bugs and usability but it’s a great step forward for the MT5 platform. The strategy tester can already be used to prepare your EA for the Automated Trading Championship 2010. Compared to the previous version (MT4) there are several important differences:

• You can test strategies that trade more than one currency pair now (for example, you can test complex expert advisors that use EUR/JPY, USD/JPY and EUR/USD arbitrage or something else more interesting).
• Distributed execution of the testing processes. You can distribute the testing among the cores of your processor and among special Testing Agents available on-line (soon available). MetaQuotes is even going to run a paid service to provide additional computing processes for EA optimization, which opens a lot of possibilities to develop really complex trading systems.
• Simpler and more easy-to-use tester interface. If you have used MT4 Strategy Tester a lot, you should understand what I am talking about.
• More detailed reports on testing and optimization, with a wide variety of fields and contexts.
• Complex visualization of the testing results (coming in the next releases).

There is currently an issue that requires to significantly increase the strategy tester’s window size to see the options for optimization and to turn it on. All bug reports and suggestions are welcome at the official MQL5 community.

If you have some interesting comments or questions regarding the new strategy tester for MetaTrader 5 platform, please, feel free to reply using the form below.