How to Properly Test a Prop Master Expert Advisor – Trading Systems – May 10, 2024

adminMay 10, 2024

A Prop Master is a type of expert advisor that must be set up correctly by a strategy tester to achieve results consistent with real account trading. The reason is that EA operates at a timed price range. It is important to set this time shift correctly as brokers have different trading server times compared to GMT time.

That is, I am talking about the first parameter. Greenwich Mean Time Make sure you set the settings correctly. To set it up correctly, you need to know twice: the current GMT time and the current time of the broker’s trading server on the terminal where you will be testing Prop Master Expert Advisor.

It’s important to remember!!! If you want to test on the weekend, you will not be able to check your broker’s trading server time because the Forex market does not work on weekends and the trading server’s time stops.

You can check the current GMT time by writing a request to Google: “What time is GMT now?” And Google will show you the time immediately, or you can go to the first site and see the time on that site. Let’s say it’s 08:16.
The time of the transaction server is also very easy to determine. To do this, you need to enter your trading terminal and open the “Market Watch” window. The window header displays the time of the transaction server. Let’s say it’s 11:16

It turns out that the server time is 3 hours ahead of GMT time, so the time shift on the trading server will be +3 GMT. Therefore, for testing purposes, we set the first parameter to +3 GMT.

Always check the recommended parameters of your trading account.

When Expert Advisors developers design Expert Advisors, they calculate what types of trading accounts the Expert Advisor will work well with. Therefore, in most cases the requirements for a trading account are set out in the Expert Advisor description on the mql5.com website. For a Prop Master Expert Advisor, specifically the requirements are:

EURUSD spread is less than 6 pips
Minimum deposit 100$
Use from 1:20
ECN, NDD or RAW account
A server ping of up to 25ms is desirable.

The most important thing for Prop Master is the spread size for the EURUSD currency pair. Nowadays there are so many brokers that it is not difficult to find one with a spread of 0 for the EURUSD currency pair. And if your broker’s spread still exceeds 6 pips, check if your account is ECN or RAW. This is an account with fees and market spreads. In the case of classic accounts, the broker does not charge a commission for trades, but the broker includes this commission in the spread (the amount of commission hidden in the spread is usually larger than that of ECN accounts). In reality, it doesn’t make much difference which account you should use, but it is important to your Prop Master Expert Advisor for proper trading.

That’s why you should check which account you have opened in your trading terminal while testing. This is because the spread size, order blocking level and other parameters are selected in your trading account at the moment of starting the test.

To ensure that your test is correct, you can set the spread size to 1 in the strategy tester. This will surely avoid testing errors due to incorrect spread size.

Set up settings and files.

Most developers work with expert advisors to provide configuration files for the currency pairs they trade. For expert advice, I have set my preference for the major currency pair, EURUSD. So, set EURUSD and H1 period for testing in Strategy Tester. You can find setup files for different currency pairs in the Prop Master Expert Advisor description on the mql5 website.

Make sure all test parameters are the same as the following picture.

Compare the developer’s results with the results you get.

If you want to find a really good expert advisor for your trading, it is important to follow all the recommendations of the developer. Therefore, before giving up cooperation with professionals, make sure that you have done everything according to the developer’s recommendations. Otherwise you risk missing the Holy Grail 😊

Below is an example of a report I received from a strategy tester. All configured according to test rules. Because I use a different quote provider and some input account parameters, your results may differ slightly from mine. However, if you get radically different results, you might want to double-check all the points in this post.