Importing data

You can import historical data into Forex Tester from different sources in text or in Meta Trader format. We provide free historical data on our site from 01/01/2001 to current moment. (www.forextester.com/datasources.html) And we recommend to use this source of data as one of the best and quality sources. Also you can use other sources that can provide data in text format or import history from MetaTrader (can not recommend it because it could have gaps in history).
It is highly recommended to use 1 minute timeframe to import into Forex Tester, it will be used to recalculate all higher timeframes. If you import, for example, 15 minutes bars, timeframes lower then 15 minutes will be incorrect.
Import of history is enabled only in History Mode , to open dialog window go to File -> Import History Data menu:
or press the button on the tool bar:

Then select a file to import. If you downloaded this file from our site packed with zip, then open and save it as a text file first with Windows Explorer.


When file is selected, program will try to find appropriate symbol where to import this data. You can import history only to symbol that exists in Symbol list. If there is no such a symbol you will need to create it first. See Symbol list. Also you can define time shift for this data. On our site we provide data with GMT + 1 time (East European Time), but you may change time zone by shifting quotes time for some number of hours.

After you pressed the Next button, program will try to determine format of the source file. With data from our site you do not need to make any changes, format will be recognized correctly. But for other sources you may need to adjust some settings, for example, date format or order of columns. In preview window you can see results of converting of the first 100 lines. Sometimes it can report some converting errors (probably source file has some extra header lines), if number of errors is not very big you can ignore them.

If import was successful, you will see next message box:

New imported data will be correctly merged with previously imported data. So, if you already imported 8 years of history and import new data for last month, it will be merged with existed data. Even if you import some new data that is overlapped with old data, part of all data will be deleted and replaced with new one.
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