I have fairly good luck with FSBPro.

My experience with Metattrader 4 and 5 is that for some reason the software is not always accurate in its calculations and that causes some differences from time to time.

I am no wizard with either of the softwares and I do not expect perfection, my expectation is a profit and so far, FSBPro is delivering approximately what I expect to see.

As an aside, a couple users have created signal services and are collecting subscription fees, somehow they have found a way to use FSPPro to their advantage.

Work a little more with the software and you will find it to be most valuable and also profitable.

Ah I do see one problem - I've been designing the bare bones of a strategy then getting the generator to go off & see if there's ways to refine & improve them.  Most of the time when it succeeds in doing so, it adds a "Next same direction signal" option to either "Add" or "Winner".  While those work well in the FSB backtest, in a MT4 backtest of the EA they fail badly, often taking multiple trades within seconds of each other.

I'd like to lock that particular part of the strategy & prevent the generator from changing it, but I can't see a way to do so...

Great thanks, I'll give that a try.  Attached is an example of a strategy that used a "Winner" addition, and how it differs between backtests, hopefully it'll be helpful.  Also I apologize in advance for the spamming of images, its just much easier to communicate what I'm seeing in screenshots.

Here's how it looks in FSB...

And the results of a tick-based MT4 backtest of the exported EA over the same data & timespan...

Here's some of the trades taken in FSB...

And the equivalent period in the MT4 backtest.  MT4 is not taking as many trades, also sometimes its adding multiple entries on the same candle which isn't happening in FSB (note the 2015.02.09 entries in particular), which to me looks like an error in the EA...

When I take the "winner" option out of the FSB strategy, its equity curve looks much more like MT4's...

Lastly, re-reading my first post on this thread it comes across as deriding FSB, which wasn't my intention as this really is an amazing product, I just want to be sure of my ground before I start throwing real money at strategies I develop with it.  Also Miroslav I do appreciate your prompt & helpful responses.

I wonder if you could email that strategy to Popov, his email is in his profile.  I am sure he will want to see the discrepancy real time so he can analyze the differences.

Thanks greatly for posting that, I know that Ahmed and Footon are also interested.

We can not really know until someone actually runs the thing real time. I am really suspicious of Metaquotes both 4 and 5, part of the reason being that they do not provide much in the way of worthwhile statistics.

I am not so sure that a MT4 backtest will be reliable regarding slippage as compared to a real account trading.

I have often seen that indicators on an MT4 screen are inaccurate.

In any event, Metaquotes is in it to make money as are the brokers and we all have heard of cases where there was some intentional distortions.

Hopwood calls them criminals for good reason!

Hopefully my post above has everything needed, the strategy's xml file is attached.

Oh I agree totally, I'm deeply suspicious of anything Metaquotes comes up with.  I don't think its any accident that "opening price" backtests in MT4 are deliberately incorrect, or that the "every tick" backtests take FOREVER to run.  I mean, the one I posted took 16 hours to complete on my very powerful PC, which is obviously a real hindrance to using the platform for any kind of real backtest work, forgetting the absence of OOS testing and Monte Carlo analysis.

What I'd expect though is that MT4's backtests would tend to sugar-coat results to make them look better than they really are, as its in Metaquotes' (and their brokers) interests for you to stop researching & start trading.  When therefore MT4 shows a significantly worse result than an independant product like FSB, I need to question what's going on.  At the very least I'd like to see a reasonable degree of correlation between the two.

Btw in my MT4 backtests I deliberately set the spread quite high (100 points) to mimic the effect of slippage.

Edit: Quick note on Steve Hopwood's site, which I've frequented on & off over the years.  There's some wonderful people & brilliant minds there but there seems to be an entrenched belief that backtesting is useless, that only forward testing is of any value.  I can understand not wanting to backtest with MT4, indeed it'd be impossible with many of the multi timeframe systems in development there, but to me a rigorous backtest is essential.  I simply won't waste time forward-testing a system if its backtest shows it blowing out accounts, and by refusing to test I'm afraid many of those guys are groping forward in the dark like blind men in a coal mine hoping to find a diamond. 

Sorry, that's rather off-topic for this thread, I'll end my little mini-rant there

Edit #2: What I'd really love one day is the ability to export to cAlgo EAs, so I can dump MT4 once & for all.

I wonder, slipshod how is it any different MT4  - it is the first time I hear of cAlgo so you might want to share a few good words about it?

cAlgo is the EA development part of cTrader.  It uses C# rather than a proprietary language like MQL.  Its use is slowly spreading among brokers - locally to me IC Markets has offered it for a while now.

Thank you slipshod