Analysing result

 When the process is finished the list of simulated trades is shown in the Strategy Manager window. You can examine when the buy and sell signals occurred, analyse Perfomance and Equity. Alternatively using Chart view in Strategy Manager you can analyse visual information when buy and sell conditions are met.

 In addition to the results list you can have more them 20 perfomance measurements available. Some of the most useful ones are:

  - Profitability is the ratio of summary profit to summary loss.
  - Absolute drowdown  is the difference between the initial deposit and the smallest value of the equity. 
  - Relative drowdown is a ratio between the maximal drawdown and the value of the corresponding local maximum of the equity.
  - Maximal drowdown  is the maximal difference between the local maximum extremum in your equity chart and the next local minimum  extremum in your equity chart.
 - Expected Payoff - the average gross profit per gross loss. Calculation formula: Net.Profit/№of trades, where Net.Profit = (Gross.Profit - Gross.Loss)

 Changing your back testing settings

 You are able to change default settings of your script and emulation process. ProTrader uses some predefined values for performing its task including the amount of commission, balance, maximum loss level and so on. All these settings could be changed by the user using Settings window. 

 - Balance - Initial Balance for backtesting
  - Brokerage comission - commision level. Commision can be charged per lot o per deal.
  - Minimum loss level, % - when your balance fall below this value, all position will be closed.
  - Modeling sheme - specifies sheme to generate ticks data for becktesting.There are 3 available shemes: Close prices only (C), Control points (O H L C), Control points+middle (O H M L C), Maximum ticks (O OH/2 H HL/2 L LC/2). 
  - Netting - you can have only 1 position per instrument. When next position is open, it's merged with the current position.
  - Amount -  default trading amount

Portfolio Backtesting

 You can backtest your own portfolio of instruments creating wihing Instruments Portfilo tool. Alternatevle you can add multy symbols when setup strategy. Multy symbols backtesting is used to see how a group of instruments would have performed historically using a particular strategy. Because multi-symbol backtesting can more accurately reflect your trading style, you may be more successful in identifying an efficient trading strategy. To start multi-symbol backtesing you need to add several symbols in Settings or select your custom instrument-portfolio and click Start button.

Used in combination, single symbol backtesting can help identify a trend or pattern that can then be validated over different time periods by using multi-symbol backtesting.

Optimization

 You can use trading system optimization when creating trading strategy. Optimization tests many possible input combinations to find ones that result in the best performance. To use the Optimization click the Optimization chekcbox in Strategy Manager window. To start optimization process with default settings just click on Start button. You will see optimization process on the left side of  Strategy Manager window. Optimization may take a long time depending on optimizing settings. Once the process is finish, you will see trading system analisys with optimal solution. You can look in Logs to see the  optimum  parameters that was found by algorithm.

You can change optimization settings to achieve better results. Click on Settings button  to open Settings window. In Optimization  window you are able to set up Optimization target - this may be Highest Balance, Lowest Drawdown or some exact P/L relation. Also you should specify parameters to optimize. Maximum and Minimum boundaries are important to get faster and better results. Choose smaller range for fast searching. 

In Setings window you may change optimization alorithm and specify custom condition for better search. Click on empty space to add new condition. In Right column select parameter, in Command column select sign (>=, ==, <=) and in Left column type value. Press Del to remove created condition. Results will be filtered to show you only variants that are met your criteria. 

  Two different optimization algorithms are available:

• Genetic Algorithm
• Partical Swarm

You can learn more about techniques by following these links.

To change algorithm settings click on  button. 

For the Genetic Algorithm (GA) next parameters are available:

• If Use elitism is checked, some of the better organisms from the current generation can be carry over to the next, unaltered.
• If Use gradient is checked, then using the best solution which was found with the GA as initial guess, a gradient-based optimization method is implemented to quickly converge towards the optimum.
• If Use sharing is checked, the GA use collective sharing which successfully allow to find robust solutions after evaluating only a few percent of the full parameter space.

Other parameters are common for the GA algorithm.

For the Particle Swarm Optimization all parameters are common. Don't change them if you are not sure about their meaning.