Guide / Home and sessions

Starting a session

Choose Backtesting or Prop firm challenge at the top, fill in the basics, and start.

• Market data: shown when you have more than one dataset.
• Name and Starting balance.
• Strategy: optional, but it is what lets analytics compare strategies across sessions.
• More instruments: optional, up to three; each is tradable, sharing the one balance. Pick one and a field for the next appears. Each symbol gets its own chart window, with a tab in the strip under the charts (XAUUSD,H1, EURUSD,H1 and so on), next to any timeframe windows you open. One shows at a time: click a tab, or a symbol in the title bar, to bring it to the front, and the ticket trades that symbol. The side by side and stacked buttons show them all at once; then click a chart to trade it (it is outlined, and its tab lit), and its maximize button to see it alone for a moment.
• The charts share one clock: all move together as the replay plays, and all are on the same timeframe, which the picker of any of them changes for the whole session. A bar of another symbol is shown only once it has closed, so none of them ever shows a moment the replay has not reached. Scroll or zoom one and the others show the same stretch of time; the crosshair is shared too.
• Play only these sessions: replay just New York, say, and skip the rest; see Play only some sessions.
• Data clock: the time zone the file's times are in. It decides which market session a trade falls in; see Data and the clock.
• Trading costs: slippage and variable spread, below. Both are remembered for the next session.
• Start from: a date and time inside your data. Blank starts at the beginning.

Trading costs

• Slippage (in pips) is added against you on every fill that takes the price there is: market orders, stop orders, a stop-loss being hit, and closing by hand. Limit orders and take-profits fill at their own price, as they do at a broker. 0 is none. Half a pip to a pip is a fair figure for a major pair outside news.
• Variable spread widens the instrument's spread the way a retail feed does: three times from 16:30 to 18:00 New York (the daily rollover, when spreads blow out) and one and a half times from 18:00 to 03:00 (the quiet Asian hours). The rest of the day it is the quoted spread. It follows New York's clock, so US daylight saving moves it. The ask line, the order ticket and open positions all show the spread in force on the current bar.

Your data's own spread

When the file you import has a spread column, every bar keeps its own spread and fills use it, minute by minute: a short's stop is tested against the ask that minute really had. The import preview shows a Spread column and says so. That real spread wins over variable spread; the spread you type in the import is then only for a bar that has none.

• MT5's History Center (Symbols, Bars, Export) writes a <SPREAD> column. It is read as it is.
• The TradeOnReplay export script writes one too, from this version. If you installed the script before, use Install MT5 exporter script in the import (under Or import directly from MetaTrader 5) again to get the new one, restart MT5, then export again.
• Files with no spread column (Dukascopy, most others) use the spread you give, and variable spread if you turn it on.

Both are saved with the session, so resuming one keeps its costs. A trade's entry and exit prices include them, and so does every figure built from them.

The basics are on the left. For a challenge, the whole rulebook is on the right, with the profit target, maximum loss and daily loss limit typed as a percentage of the account. See Starting a challenge.

Replaying a trade, and copying a session

Replay this trade in the journal (or Replay in the History table) opens this form pre-filled to start at that trade's entry bar with the future hidden again. Start a copy on a session does the same with that session's balance and strategy.

In a replayed trade, a bar under the toolbar holds the original trade (its side, entry time, lots, stop and target) and, as you trade it again, your retake's result beside it with the difference from the original's. It only compares: it places nothing for you, so the bars ahead stay unseen.