Open the MetaTrader 4 Strategy Tester, choose the "Every tick" model, and it looks like you are replaying history tick by tick. You are not. Those ticks do not come from a recorded feed. Your terminal manufactures them, on the fly, from minute bars it already holds.
That single fact reframes most of what gets written about forex simulators for MT4. This page works through what the Strategy Tester actually does, what third-party replay tools do differently, and what one United States regulator requires when simulated results are used to persuade. We take figures from primary documents wherever they exist and say plainly where they do not.
Three things this page will not do: rank products, attach a dollar figure to "what you should spend", or imply that any backtest result predicts live performance. Where a claim in the draft version of this article could not be traced to a source, it has been removed rather than hedged.
MetaQuotes publishes a technical article on its own MQL5.com site, numbered 1511, that explains the modelling inside the MT4 Strategy Tester. It lists three methods:
The mechanics sit underneath the labels. The article explains that all three methods use the open, high, low and close of smaller timeframes as control points, and generate the price movement between control points "using an interpolation method based on predefined templates". Why interpolate at all? The article opens with the answer: a complete tick history would be ideal, "but in reality this situation practically does not exist".
Read those two sentences together and the conclusion follows on its own. The accuracy ceiling of an MT4 backtest is set by the smallest timeframe of history data your terminal holds, not by which of the three modelling buttons you pressed. Every tick and Control points differ in how much of that available history they use. Neither can conjure a tick that was never recorded.
The same article states three constraints that rarely make it into third-party guides. Each one changes how a backtest report should be read.
The warm-up band deserves a second look. A strategy that appears to lose money in its opening stretch, or to win unusually often there, may be doing neither. The tester simply had no generated data for those bars.
Brokers' MT4 documentation describes a "Visual mode" checkbox in the tester. Enabling it shows the test on a chart, a slider adjusts the visualisation speed, and a "Skip to" field jumps the display to a chosen date.
The claim that the built-in tester "lacks speed control", which appears in several comparison articles and in the draft this page replaces, is wrong on its face. What the built-in tester genuinely lacks is a different thing: recorded ticks. Third-party replay tools close that gap by importing real tick data from external sources, then playing it back inside the same MetaTrader interface.
Two source levels sit behind this section and they are not the same. The modelling mechanics come from MetaQuotes' own published article. The speed slider description comes from broker documentation of the client terminal. Both describe the same product, but only the first is a statement from the platform vendor.
United States Code of Federal Regulations, Title 17, Section 4.41, governs advertising by commodity pool operators, commodity trading advisors, and their principals. Paragraph (b)(1)(i) prescribes the wording that must accompany any presentation of simulated or hypothetical performance. The prescribed statement reads:
"These results are based on simulated or hypothetical performance results that have certain inherent limitations. Unlike the results shown in an actual performance record, these results do not represent actual trading. Also, because these trades have not actually been executed, these results may have under-or over-compensated for the impact, if any, of certain market factors, such as lack of liquidity. Simulated or hypothetical trading programs in general are also subject to the fact that they are designed with the benefit of hindsight. No representation is being made that any account will or is likely to achieve profits or losses similar to these being shown."
Two things about that text matter more than its words. The first is who it binds: operators and advisors presenting performance to prospective clients, not hobbyists practising at home. The second is what its existence tells you. A regulator felt it necessary to prescribe, in exact language, what anyone showing simulated results must admit about them.
The draft this page replaces attributed three quotations to the CFTC, the NFA and FINRA in support of the same point. We could not locate any of the three in primary material, so all three are gone. The regulation above is what we could verify, and it makes the argument more precisely than the unverifiable quotations did.
Two commercial tools account for most of the replay-simulator conversation around MT4. Both publish product pages with specifics. The draft also carried a fourth column labelled "Forex Simulator Pro (Example)", invented by the draft's own author and priced at a number nobody ever charged. It is gone.
A plugin, not a standalone application. It runs inside MetaTrader 4 and MetaTrader 5 as an expert advisor and replays historical data on your existing charts.
That multi-currency line is where the draft's comparison table said "Limited" and stopped. Read the vendor page and the limitation is sharper: the capability exists on MT5 and does not exist on MT4. A buyer who picks the MT4 licence on the assumption that both versions behave the same will not get the feature.
A browser-based backtesting platform, rather than a MetaTrader plugin, published by the team behind the Forex Tester desktop line.
The draft this page replaces gave each product a single dollar range. That framing misses three things, all of them visible on the vendors' own pages.
For that reason this page prints no fixed price. The figures that were true when we checked, including S$379 and S$599 as the non-promotional lifetime prices for the Starter and Pro plans, are recorded in the sources section with the date we saw them. Confirm today's number on the vendor page before you plan anything around it.
MetaTrader 4 shipped in 2005 and still runs on a large installed base. Two points recur across independent write-ups: MetaQuotes has stopped adding features to it, and the mobile apps were pulled from Apple's App Store and Google's Play Store in September 2022 before returning in most regions.
One detail does not agree. One source states MetaQuotes stopped issuing new MT4 licences to brokers in 2018. Another states 2022. We looked for a MetaQuotes announcement and did not find one, so this page reports the disagreement instead of picking a year.
What a reader can settle without any of these sources: open your own terminal, check the build number under Help and About, and ask your broker which builds it still supports. That answers the only version of the question that affects you.
None of the above tells you whether a strategy works. It does change how the evidence in front of you should be weighed.
The last point is the one with money attached. On a five-minute chart with a ten-pip stop, the difference between the high coming before the low and the low coming before the high is the difference between a loss and a win. MT4's tester resolves that ambiguity with a template. Decide for yourself whether that is an acceptable substitute.
One figure from the wider market does belong here. The Bank for International Settlements' triennial survey put daily global foreign exchange turnover at 9.6 trillion US dollars in April 2025, up from 7.5 trillion in the previous 2022 survey. The draft quoted the older figure. Both come from the same survey series; the 2025 one is the current edition.