forex software

Create and Test Forex Strategies

forex software

fsbpro_guide:balance_chart

Balance Chart

The balance chart displays the movement of your account balance during the backtest. With a single look, you can evaluate your strategy. The Y-axis represents the money in your account. The X-axis represents the time that has passed. Clicking on the chart in strategy editor tab will take you to the balance chart tool. The balance chart tool displays the same chart in more detail.

Balance Chart

Chart Lines

Balance and Equity lines are always visible. Other lines can be switched on and off from the Control Panel → General.

Balance line (blue)

You can easily distinguish the balance line from the other lines by its intermittent movement. This type of movement occurs because the line changes only if a position is closed. While the position is open, the balance line will stay horizontal and just move to the right. Every time the balance line moves vertically, the amount of money in your account changes.

Equity line (yellow)

The equity line shows the current profit. Unlike the balance line, where “real” money moving in and out of your account, the equity line displays only the “virtual” movement of the money in your account. This means you are not really having profit (or loss) until the position is closed. The difference between the movement of the equity and balance lines is the floating profit loss.

When creating a strategy you will be looking for equity/balance lines that grow steadily without going up and down too much.

Long and Short balance (green and red)

The equity and balance lines show the movements of our account from short as well as from long positions. By looking only at those two lines you cannot tell if the strategy works equally well when opening short and long positions. You can but easily see this if you have enabled the long and short balance lines in the control panel (“Show long and short balance lines on Balance/Equity Chart”). The green line represents the balance from long positions. The red line represents the balance from short positions. The blue (balance) line represents the sum of both the green and the red lines. There are strategies that work better in one direction. For example if the red line is going up, but the green one is going down it is easy to see that his strategy works better with short positions. This in turn means that the strategy is over-optimized and works only in one direction, which is not a good sign. In an ideal strategy, the balance line would go diagonally up and to the right; the red and green lines would be moving together in the same direction.

Close Price (gray)

The close price line shows the trading price on the balance chart. This allows you to see how your strategy reacts to the changes in the market.

Shorter Periods' Distribution

Shorter Periods Distribution

This one is visible only when you have enabled the “Use all shorter periods and tick data to improve interpolation” option from the control panel. The color of the line shows what data FSB Pro is using: red for D1, orange for H4 etc. When you move your cursor above the chart, you can see the data period about the period that FSB Pro uses in the status bar.

Out of Sample Zone

This zone has a green background. You can see it only in the generator and optimizer if you have enabled the OOS option. You can read more about OOS testing in the generator article.

Dynamic Info

In the status bar, FSB Pro displays data about the current time, the state of your account balance and equity as well as data period are