There are two base approaches to develop and test trading strategies in ForexTester.

First, and an essential for majority of traders - is manual testing. Traders can make virtual trading decisions on historical data. Several kinds of orders are supported: market order, limit order, stop order, breakeven stop order, predefined set of "packet" orders.

All of these trading desicions are made in almost true "real life" conditions - updating historical prices. But trader gets additional advantages. He/she can choose the period of testing and regulate the speed of price updating. Trader can even backstep and "replay" the history once more.

All executed trades are documented and stored in "Account history". Constantly updating Equity, Balance, Margin and Drawdown graphs show the result of trading decisions to provide trader with effective feedback. Also Statistics is updating in real-time to show such values as "Total trades", "Profit Trades", "Average Profit", "Profit Factor" and others. All executed trades can be monitored on charts.

Second, developing of mechanical trading systems. Although it is a bit complicated and trader should posess the knowledge of programming languages and the process of writing such a system assumes the using of programming environment, it could be of some help to test trading algorithm with strict rules in fast and precise manner. Our testing engine provides "tick by tick" calculation, 3 different types of tick generation, portfolio testing of one strategy on many currencies and moreover - portoflio testing of several trading strategies simultaneously.

There are 2 working modes in the program - Edit Mode and Testing Mode.

Edit Mode is designed to store all imported history, allows import and export history, edit currency list and prepare data for Testing mode.

Testing Mode is designed for working with pregenerated in Edit mode data arrays, trade on historical data, test trading strategies, see statistics and profit diagram.

This diagram shows relationship between two modes: