Boston Technologies History Center Rescues MetaTrader Backtests

I was browsing around the Boston Technologies website yesterday for a very different reason, when I made an interesting discovery – the Boston Technologies History Center. As we reported recently, the historical data you can download into the MetaTrader 4 History Center seems to have developed some big gaps recently. If you're new to MT4 backtesting, or if you haven't been religiously logging in to your account regularly to keep your data up to date, this might well cause your backtest results to be rather misleading. This problem has affected the backtesting of some members of our Community, and they now have another solution to their difficulties apart from waiting for me to export some of my own data from MetaTrader!

Boston Technologies have helpfully made it easy to create the data in a format suitable for importing straight into the MetaTrader 4 history center, by allowing you to specify the time zone your own broker uses, and also to specify a suffix to be tagged on the end of the standard symbols for each pair. For example, if you're using a Smart Live Markets MT4 spread bet account the time zone is GMT+1 and every symbol has "SB" added to it. This makes it impossible to download ANY historical data from Metaquotes, with or without gaps!

Here's how we set up our first download to fill out our MT4 forex spread betting historical data:

BT History Center Setup for Smart Live SB during British Summer Time

After we clicked the "Download" button we then had to endure the promised long wait.  The data is sent as a comma separated text file and is not compressed in any way. Nonetheless it does arrive eventually, whereupon it is easily imported into MetaTrader via the history centre. Before doing that though, remember to export your existing historical data to provide a backup in case anything goes wrong during the import process.

It looks as though it might get a bit complicated getting all the data aligned properly, allowing  for daylight saving time in different parts of the world. We started off downloading data for British Summer Time only, starting on March 28th 2010.  We found we had to make sure our starting date and time were set AFTER the moment at which daylight saving time kicked in to make sure the downloaded one minute bars tied in properly with those already saved from Smart Live's servers.

We'll keep you posted about any further difficulties we encounter in getting our historical data just the way we like it.