You can see the image below for what this looks like. You will need to make sure the ‘scroll chart’ button is off. It is very important you make sure that price does not continue to roll back to the live and up to date price. Then, on your MT4 or MT5 charts you will want to choose your market and time frame that you want to carry out your backtest. The first thing you will need is a trading journal so you can journal your trades as you go through your backtest. If you are using MetaTrader, then you have a very easy way that you can start backtesting your trading strategies. NOTE: If you do not yet have the best MetaTrader charts, you can read about how to get the best free trading charts and the broker to backtest with here. Note: Get a free PDF guide on how to trade price action trading strategies below that you can use to start backtesting with. That is the only way that you will know whether a system or strategy actually works or not.

The best results when carrying out a backtest will come when you are methodical and follow a clear trading rule set. This is suited to trading styles such as price action and technical analysis where your trading is not automated. Whilst there are many ways to automatically backtest indicators and EA’s, in this post we are going to look at how you can manually backtest your trading strategy. This is obviously very important because you don’t want to be wasting months or even years on a strategy that is never going to make you any money.

Backtesting will quickly help you know if the trading strategy or system you are using is profitable.

Thinkorswim backtesting manual