Strange Strategy Tester Behaviour

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I've been testing and tweaking a couple new EAs I built (in MT4) and tonight I noticed something odd when running it with the Visual mode checked. The code of the EA selected for testing was completely written by me, but, there are trades showing up in the chart window which my EA didn't place and which have a different name and magic number listed when hovering over the buy/sell arrows. This name and magic number match another EA I downloaded from this site, and played around with, some time ago. There is also no record of those trades in the backtester journal or results tabs. What the heck is going on? Should I be worried about my account?

Any advice would be much appreciated,

 
WanderingGuppy: I've been testing and tweaking a couple new EAs I built (in MT4) and tonight I noticed something odd when running it with the Visual mode checked. The code of the EA selected for testing was completely written by me, but, there are trades showing up in the chart window which my EA didn't place and which have a different name and magic number listed when hovering over the buy/sell arrows. This name and magic number match another EA I downloaded from this site, and played around with, some time ago. There is also no record of those trades in the backtester journal or results tabs. What the heck is going on? Should I be worried about my account?

That is highly unlikely, so there must be something wrong in your setup.

The most common cause is when you save a template from one of those visual tests and then use the same template on another test.

When saving a template, it will save all the graphical information of trades that were made, and so when you reuse the template on another chart you will see all those graphical objects that represent those trades, even though the journal itself will have no record of such trades.

So, when creating templates, always save them from a clean chart, with only those indicators or graphical objects that you want included and not any unwanted details that have nothing to do with what you want to save to the template.

PS! The same applies for the special default templates such as "default.tpl" and "tester.tpl".

EDIT. I sometimes do this on purpose when I want to compare results between two EAs or two versions of the same EA to spot differences in the trades, but one has to be careful not to be confused by the extra details.

 
Fernando Carreiro:

That is highly unlikely, so there must be something wrong in your setup.

The most common cause is when you save a template from one of those visual tests and then use the same template on another test.

When saving a template, it will save all the graphical information of trades that were made, and so when you reuse the template on another chart you will see all those graphical objects that represent those trades, even though the journal itself will have no record of such trades.

So, when creating templates, always save them from a clean chart, with only those indicators or graphical objects that you want included and not any unwanted details that have nothing to do with what you want to save to the template.

PS! The same applies for the special default templates such as "default.tpl" and "tester.tpl".

EDIT. I sometimes do this on purpose when I want to compare results between two EAs or two versions of the same EA to spot differences in the trades, but one has to be careful not to be confused by the extra details.


Thanks Fernando, that's a relief. I had actually noticed that you need to be careful when saving the templates as it can have your EA attached which will open each time the template is used. But it hadn't occurred to me that past trades would be saved. That's a cool little trick to compare EAs I'm definitely going to use that.

Thanks again,

Joshua

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