Chart Backtesting VS Portfolio Backtesting

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Revision as of 10:22, 11 July 2019 by Abeloglazova (talk | contribs)
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MultiCharts and Portfolio Trader serve for different purposes and backtesting on charts and in Portfolio is not supposed to match. Still there some recommendations that can help bringing the backtesting on charts and in Portfolio as close to each other as possible.

Instrument settings


Important: Portfolio workspace should contain only 1 symbol in the Data 1 column!
  1. Only one symbol from one data source must be used and they must be identical in both the MultiCharts Chart and the Portfolio Trader;
  2. The following parameters should be set identically:

*Data Range and Time Zone for Portofio are specified in the common Data settings.

Signal settings

  1. Signals’ inputs on the chart should match those in Portfolio precisely;
  2. Intra-Bar Order Generation has to be disabled on charts, because this mode is not available in Portfolio.

Strategy settings

The following strategy settings should also match:

  1. on the Properties tab:
  2. on the Backtesting tab:

Portfolio Trader specific settings

The following settings are unavailable on charts, therefore they need to be configured so that they don’t influence Portfolio backtesting. In the Money Management Settings section:

  • Max % of Capital at Risk per Position should be set to 100%.
  • Initial Portfolio Capital should be set to maximum which is $1 000 000 000.


NOTE: Even with all of these recommendations implemented there’s a possibility that the backtesing results in both applications will not match. This is related to the code’s specific and one should review the strategy’s code to find the reason for the discrepancy. An example of how to do that can be found here.