EA LAB

In a strategy video, the rules always work on the chart the presenter picked. A check by hand on years of your own market's prices takes weeks of stepping through candles. EA LAB turns strategies of this kind into robots for MetaTrader 5, a trading program that many brokers offer their customers. The robot follows fixed rules to open and close trades by itself, and MetaTrader can run it on past prices first.

The library sorts its 28 robots, Expert Advisors in MetaTrader's terms, by method: Renko charts, Wyckoff price patterns, breakouts or falling markets, for example. Each robot page writes out the entry and exit rules and the settings you can change, and it names the limits of the method. An example test rebuilt from the original MetaTrader report shows the deepest drop in account value and the number of trades next to the profit.

An activation key unlocks demo and live trading on two MetaTrader account and server combinations, and tests on past data run without it. The site promises no profits and asks users to try their settings on data left out of the test, then on a demo account, before real money is involved. Strategy Lab guides explain how to read a backtest and how to spot settings that only fit the past.