If you were expecting a flashy sales page, I’m sorry to disappoint you. The Tick Data Suite is geared towards individuals who are not impressed by huge colored and possibly flashing text, so all that you will read below are facts that you should know prior to purchasing your copy.
Backtesting Forex strategies is certainly one of the most efficient ways of gauging their profitability potential. I would go as far as saying it’s THE best way unless you’re in possession of very extensive forward testing results. However, with Metatrader 4 – the most popular Forex platform nowadays – backtesting is inherently flawed. Metatrader 4 does not store the actual ticks coming from the broker’s server; the best data at its disposal is data from the M1 timeframe – it only has the open, high, low, close and number of ticks for each minute. So, if it only has these for values, you might be wondering how does it produce the ticks that happened within each minute and the answer is easy: it generates fake ticks through interpolation based on the tick count for each minute. If you didn’t understand what’s the problem yet, I’ll point it out for you: the ticks generated this way are not the real ticks, they are essentially fake ticks! Not only that, but Metatrader 4 is only able to backtest your robot using the fixed spread, whereas all good brokers nowadays use variable spread! It simply uses the current spread of your broker so, for example, if you’re testing an Asian scalper robot during the day, the results will be completely misleading.
Now, if you have a strategy that deals with hundreds of pips for each trade and only closes at a stop loss or take profit, the fact that the ticks in your backtest are not the actual ticks does not really matter that much. However, if you have a scalping strategy that takes profit at 10-20 pips or if you have a strategy that follows the market closely with a trailing stop, backtesting with ticks that actually happened and with the real spread will make a world of difference.
That’s where the Tick Data Suite steps in – using it allows you to use tick data and variable spread in your Metatrader 4 backtesting to obtain an unprecedented accuracy and 99% modeling quality. Since tick data is available for free from multiple brokers, you can even test your expert advisors to see how they would perform with different data sources. By using the Tick Data Suite you can certainly perform a much better appraisal of the strategy you’re evaluating and you can gain the confidence needed to test it live.
In case you’re wondering how dramatic can the dissimilarity be, take a look at the backtests in my Fast Forex Millions article – the difference between what you get with history center data and what you get with tick data is obvious: while the EA performed very nice with history center data, it didn’t do nearly as well when backtested with tick data. For that matter, you can take a look at pretty much any of my articles that includes backtests and judge the contrast between tick data and history center data.
You’re invited to check it out yourself – a free 7 day trial is available with the full functionality of the product. All you have to do is download it, follow the other guides on this website and get started with your own 99% modeling quality backtests! I’m not going to tell you that it’s very easy, but if you’re committed to getting the best possible accuracy in your backtests I have no doubt that you will be able to summon the will to go through the process and at the end you will probably conclude that it wasn’t that hard after all. Personally, as anyone can see in my articles, I use tick data for virtually all the robots that I backtest and there’s nothing that keeps you from doing the same!
The Tick Data Suite is priced at $97 and includes one month of free support & updates. Once this period expires, a $10 monthly subscription is charged for continued support and updates.
Upon confirmation of your purchase, the product will be immediately available for download. The serial number that you are provided is valid on a single workstation with unlimited Metatrader 4 clients. Moving it to a different workstation (for instance, your VPS) is a seamless process, but it is worth noting that this can only be performed once every 48 hours and it deactivates your copy on any other workstations.
Full refunds can be requested and will be granted within the first 60 days from the date of the purchase, however please consider trying out the full featured Tick Data Suite trial version prior to purchasing to determine if it meets your needs.
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hi birt, before i will purchase the tds, i want to try the trial version; but i just dowloaded the trial version of tds, installed in my computer, when i double clicked the tds.exe , i had an error msg: “you are allowed a single trial license per computer and this one is not the first” , even after i restart the computer or uninstall and re-install the tds, it was still the same error msg; how to fix it ? 3x very much!
That message is because you already had a trial 1 year ago (started on 14.08.2012). However, I reset the status of your PC on the authentication server so you should be able to take another trial now (using your new license key).
the problem was fixed, 3x for your so quick reply birt! but there is only 3 days left…
Tick Data Suite - Birt"s EA review