Expert Advisor Tester Mode In Smart Forex Tester – How It Works

Smart Forex Tester can now work as an Expert Advisor Tester – for the EA available as a source code. This functionality is available starting from the release 1.0, which reuses the same proven platform that our popular Forex Simulator is built on.

You can test EA on live streaming prices and also back test. Smart Forex Tester only uses real tick-by-tick historical market data – no interpolations!

Expert Advisor support comes as a consequence when our new Smart Forex Tester started supporting the trading strategies as C++ code. Expert Advisors are written in MQ language, which is to a great extent compatible with C++.

Expert Advisor tester in Smart Forex Tester
Smart Forex Tester as Expert Advisor tester

Note that the primary reason we added C++ support to our Tester was not to enable EA testing. Programming environment is needed to give more power to the users to define their strategy. Also, ultimately the new Tester will also support trading strategies as state machines and for that C++ will be the way to add new signals.

To avoid any licence collisions, Smart Forex Tester don’t provide full EA compatibility. However, the changes needed into the Expert Advisor’s code are straightforward. There are language changes and trading functions replacement.

First of all, you need to load the EA source code into our Tester and compile it. At this phase there will be some errors, as MQ is not fully compatible with C++. You need to fix that by making small changes in the syntax.

Next, we need to replace the market data and trading functions, like onTick() or orderSend(), with the corresponding interfaces to the Tester engine that are available to the trading strategy. They will facilitate receiving new ticks from the Tester’s data feeds and sending trading commands from the EA to the Tester.

In the following releases, we will be stabilizing the new framework, enhancing EA compatibility, improving the graphics and adding more functions. You can check our roadmap.

Subscribe to download release 0.9.5 of Smart Forex Tester.