The backtesting platform that will build your edge before you ever risk a dollar
Before you click Create Session, take 30 seconds to tighten two account settings. This will save you confusion for the rest of your FXReplay life.
From your dashboard, hit Create Session. This opens the session setup screen where you'll configure everything before you enter the replay.
If you're testing a $50K prop challenge, start with $50K. Not $1 million. Psychology matters even in practice.
Your brain needs to feel the same pressure it will feel on the live account. Inflated fake balance = inflated fake confidence.
FXReplay lets you add up to 5 assets in one session, but for GWORLz we're starting with only NQ. One asset, one focus, one setup at a time.
Start at least 6 months back. If you want to test through a CPI print or an FOMC day, pick a date range that includes those events. Learning how your setup behaves around news is part of the reps.
Tag the session with the setup you're testing (London X, NY X, Scalping). This is what lets the analytics filter by strategy later. A session without tags is wasted data.
Hit save. The chart drops you at your selected start date, ready to replay. You're set.
FXReplay pulls futures data directly from the CME. Here's what's available to us and a few things you need to know about how the platform handles NQ.
That's over a decade of NQ data. Plenty of material to build real pattern recognition.
It's what we trade live. Your backtest should mirror your real account.
One asset, one setup, one win-rate number. Mixing markets pollutes your data.
Real volume. Real wicks. Real price action. Not a forex broker approximation.
One of the first settings you'll notice in a futures session is the choice between ETH and RTH. This matters more than most students realize.
Our entire strategy stack is built around session liquidity. London X runs off the London session high and low. NY X runs off levels that form during the Asian and London sessions before NY open.
If you toggle RTH on, you literally cannot see those levels. The chart will lie to you about where price has been. We trade ETH because our edge lives in the overnight data.
We already covered this in class, so this is a quick refresher plus a calculator to size your backtests the right way every single time.
Simple rule here. We keep execution clean and fast. Market orders only.
When your setup prints, click Buy or Sell on the order panel. You're filled at the current candle's close. That's it.
This mirrors exactly how we execute live. No limit orders sitting in mid-air. No projection tools. Just clean market entries at the moment the setup confirms.
This is the heart of everything. If you take one thing from this entire guide, let it be this.
Before you go live (or go back live) on any single setup, you need 100 clean backtested reps of it. Not 100 random trades. 100 reps of the exact setup, on the exact timeframe, with the exact entry criteria.
100 is the number where the data becomes statistically meaningful. 20 reps can fool you. 50 reps can still be luck. By 100, your win rate, profit factor, and drawdown are telling you the truth about your edge.
Instead of replaying 6 months of minute-by-minute action, use FXReplay's Go-To-Date tool to jump straight to 9 AM EST each morning. Skip the overnight chop. Focus your reps where you actually trade live.
At roughly 15 to 20 minutes per trading day, 100 reps is about 10 to 15 hours of focused work. Spread across 2 to 3 weeks, that's 40 minutes a day. Completely doable alongside everything else you have going on.
Tags and journal entries are what turn raw trades into actionable data. Skip these and your 100 reps are worthless.
Open the Journal tab inside your active session. For every trade you take, add a short note about what the setup looked like and why you took it. Attach a screenshot if the setup was textbook, or textbook-broken.
After 100 reps, these notes become your personal playbook. You will start to see patterns in what you wrote that you didn't notice in the moment.
Tag every trade with three things:
Tags are what let the analytics filter by strategy later. A trade without a tag is a wasted rep. You will not remember why you took it two weeks from now.
After you close a session, the Analytics tab shows you the numbers that actually matter. This is where FXReplay earns its subscription.
Context-dependent. A 45% win rate on a 1:3 R:R setup is excellent. A 70% win rate on a 1:1 R:R setup might actually be losing you money after commissions.
Gross wins divided by gross losses. Above 1.5 is strong. Below 1.2 and you are barely above break-even after slippage. This is the number I look at first. If your profit factor is above 1.5 after 100 reps, the strategy has real edge.
The largest peak-to-trough loss in the session. If your max drawdown is bigger than a prop firm's daily loss limit, your sizing is too aggressive for that challenge.
FXReplay breaks down your P&L by hour. If you are only profitable between 9:30 and 10:15 AM EST, the data is telling you to stop trading outside that window. Listen to it. This is one of the most valuable reports on the platform.
Runs your trade results through thousands of randomized sequences to show you the realistic range of outcomes. It tells you what a bad streak looks like even when your strategy is profitable over time. Every serious GWORL should run Monte Carlo before going live with a new setup.
Takes your actual trades and shows what performance would have looked like at different take-profit levels. Were you leaving money on the table by cutting winners at 1.5R when 2R would have hit 80% of the time? The RR sim tells you.
Shows you how much heat your winning trades typically took before reaching target. If your winners consistently go 1.5R against you before coming back, you may need to widen your stop or reconsider your entry location.
Every one of these will ruin your data. I've seen GWORLz fall into all of them. Learn from this list so you don't have to.
Do not enter 3 candles after the setup formed because you already know it worked. Only enter at the candle where you would have realistically pulled the trigger live. Backtesting is useless if you cheat.
Do not size bigger on your "best" setups after the fact. Size consistently based on your actual risk rules. Every trade gets the same size.
The tag and the note are what make this data actionable later. No note equals no pattern recognition. A rep without a note is half a rep.
One setup per session. Finish 100 reps of London X before you start on NY X. Split focus kills your data.
Turn on spreads and commissions in session settings. Roughly $5 round-trip per NQ contract adds up across 100 trades. Your real edge is after commissions, not before.
One bad backtest streak does not mean the setup is broken. Finish the 100 reps before you judge. A profitable strategy can still have a 10-loss streak inside it.
If your rules say 1:2 R:R, you take 1:2 R:R. The second you start "managing" your stop in a backtest, your data becomes fantasy.
We covered this in Chapter Three. Our session-based setups require overnight data. RTH hides it. Always run ETH.
Screenshot it. Pin it to your monitor. Come back to it weekly.