Forex Tester Forum (Professional Training Software for Traders)

[maurits2000]

I want to strongly suggest that you change the standard data that you offer with FT, since like you do it now it gives un-reliable testing conclusions with almost every strategy.

Why is that? Because now every real day (trading starting in New Zealand until closing in New York) is presented by you over 2 days! The time zone you use shifts the data of the New Zealand trading to the "next" day. This makes a. conclusions in general unreliable and b. especially those which rely on closing and opening day prices and c. you create problems for yourself: you are stuck with a few hours of data that you represent on Sunday . You try to solve that with an option to ignore these "sunday" data-sets. Ignore?!
Mind you, this misrepresenting of NZ trading happens every day. It is not only a Sunday bar issue.

A few examples of what goes wrong now:
- all moving averages of days are wrongly calculated
- Inside Day strategy:(an Inside day is a day of which the High is lower than the previous's day High and the Low is also higher than the previous day Low). Almost all "Sundays" are now Inside Days! Fake Inside Days!
- Reversal Day: (the opposite of an Inside Day; higher High and lower Low than the previous day). Because of your "Sundays" now most Mondays become reversal days!
- Channel Break Outs: since you present a few trading hours on the wrong day, a Channel Break Out can just - or just not occur because of this movement

- etc etc

Your option of "ignoring weekends" when downloading data is NOT a solution. You can not throw away or ignore market data.


What I suggest you should do to solve this issue?
Trading starts in New Zealand as we all know. Closing of New York is widely regarded as trading day closing. Between their times you have e.g. London, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Singapore and Sydney. These financial centers together represent about 99% of world forex trading and should always remain together in one day frame.
Since NZ to NY cover 19 hours of 24 hours time zones, the "left over hours" after New York closing should be added "in front of" the next day. At the end of the week you add the friday night after NY closing to monday morning. No Sundays, no ignoring of data.

This should be done BY YOU when you get the data set from your supplier and not be left to customers who will maybe not always know and understand all the time zones used and the consequences they have for their testing results.
So the option to shift time zones like you have is nice, but only for the individual who has good reasons to want to change them.

I really hope you make this change on the data soon since as long as this is not done your customers will draw unreliable conclusions using FT and its standard data.

[maurits2000]

Just retested with the "ignore weekend" option a few strategy/currency pair combinations.

The influence of this matter is so big that some previously highly profitable combinations now (with the ignore option checked) are losing.
Others need a total different set of variables (stop-loss, SMA etc) to perform at best.

[FT Support]

Hi Maurits,

Hmm, we just provide data in GMT time zone, like it goes on many brokers, if you do not like this time zone then just use "Shift time" setting in Data Center. Note that you will need to re-generate ticks after that. With this parameter you can move different sessions inside or outside 1 day.

[maurits2000]

This is the most easy answer that you could give.
But it is also a non-answer because

a. you data from brokers whose purpose is trading, not forex testing

b. many of your customers will not see the problem, until they dig deep into the testing and the data used

c. your sunday data bars still are there or are "thrown away"

The purpose of the software that you sell is to test Forex. Any comment that (positively) critizises your product should be taken seriously by you. Investigated and if found true, then acted upon.
If found untrue then come with solid arguments why it is untrue.

That is what a company does when it takes it customers seriously.

[FT Support]

Sorry Maurits,

But we cannot understand. Each forex broker works in his own time zone and actually in our program you will get the same default time zone as in many brokers (for example FXCM). So what is the problem?
And you can adjust time zone to be convenient for you by shifting data by a few hours.

Did you try data shifting?
If yes then why shifting data does not help?

[dackjaniels]

Hi,

I didn't start this thread but I do have some comments...

1.
Many brokers use their local time for MT4 and in many cases the offset from GMT changes due to Daylight Savings Time.
For instance, the broker Trading Point in Cyprus uses GMT+3 in summer and GMT+2 in winter, as a result, on its MT4 platform there are never any weekend bars, only Monday to Friday.
What this means is that if we use the free Forexite (GMT) data and simply shift it by +2 or +3 hours either the summer or winter data will be incorrect by 1 hour. This also results in weekend bars for approx 6 months of the year (these weekend bars really only contain 1 minute of data but this 1 minute causes a weekend bar to be created in FT).

2.
Even when using a data source such as Alpari UK, which is already collected in alignment with Daylight Saving Time, when a shift (of +2) is applied there are still stray (erroneous) ticks that result in weekend bars being created.

Both of these situations can cause issues when running strategies based on daily bars designed for use on a broker that does not display any 'weekend' bars.

So far the only possible solution I have found is to:

1) Import data such as Alpari UK (which includes the DST change mid-year)
2) Shift it by +2hrs then export it to a file
3) Re-import into FT with 'Ignore Weekends' checked (with no Shift Time applied)

This process applies the correct time shift and then removes those erroneous weekend bars but is time consuming and impractical for lots of currency pairs and regular updates.

The only solution I see is to apply the following functions in this order:

1. Add an 'Apply DST' checkbox option to time-shift the Forexite data on import which will adjust the data in line with DST (so the result is GMT+1 in summer and GMT in winter).
2. Add a time shift option that works permanently on import. So it could be set to +2. (The data would now be GMT+3 in summer and GMT+2 in winter).
3. Finally apply the Ignore weekends option so any stray ticks are removed and no erroneous weekend bars are created.

The final result would be data which is GMT+3 in summer and GMT+2 in winter, with no weekend bars displayed, which is in line with the Cyprus based Trading Point broker.
Of course these options could be varied to create data comparable to almost any broker on the planet. As many brokers do not provide historical data this would be the next best option in my opinion.

Steve

[Makai]

This thread leaves me with more questions than answers.
Is this a problem? How can I test this?
I don`t understand what the weekend bars are about and how the data gets out of sync, if that is a correct description.

[raybackjoe]

Just retested with the "ignore weekend" option a few strategy/currency set combos.
The impact of the particular matter is really so big that some previously definitely profitable combinations today (with the disregard selection checked) are really losing.