Short answer
- Strategy Lab is manual backtesting and trade replay in one screen: pick an instrument and a start date, then walk the chart forward one bar at a time and trade what you see.
- The data is FxMind's own MT5 feed: two years of 1-minute candles on 48 instruments, with some history on 109 in total. The session tells you how far back it can go for the instrument you picked, and refuses a start date past that.
- Fills follow rules, not hope: a market order fills at the close of the bar you decided on, a stop wins over a target inside the same bar, and a price that gaps past a stop fills at the open. The same numbers the journal uses (R-multiple, MFE/MAE, score) apply to a practice trade too.
- Nothing here reaches a broker. A practice trade never touches a real account, and a session's cursor only moves forward, never back, so a result cannot be replayed with the next bars already on screen.
Words used here
- Bar / candle
- One interval of price: open, high, low and close. Strategy Lab replays 1-minute bars.
- Cursor
- The point in history the replay has walked to. It only moves forward.
- Fill
- The price a market or pending order actually executes at, decided by the rules below rather than by whichever price looks best afterwards.
- Gap
- When price jumps between one bar's close and the next bar's open with no trading in between, most often over a weekend.
- R-multiple
- A trade's result measured against its own risk: a trade that made twice what it risked is +2R.
- MFE / MAE
- Maximum favourable / adverse excursion: how far a trade moved in your favour, and against you, while it was open.
What Strategy Lab is
Pick an instrument, a timeframe and a starting point in history, and Strategy Lab opens the desk's own chart with the feed replaced by a walk through the past. Everything else about the chart is unchanged: your indicators, your drawings, the crosshair. You trade the bar in front of you with the same order ticket as a live account, and each trade closes into the session with the numbers the journal already knows how to show.
How far back it goes
The data is FxMind's own MT5 feed, the same one the live chart and the calendar's usual-move numbers come from. 48 instruments hold two full years of 1-minute candles, and 109 instruments in total hold some history, though not always two years of it. Before a session starts, it asks the feed how far back it goes for the instrument you picked and says so in a sentence; a start date past that is refused rather than quietly served with nothing behind it.
One bar at a time
The chart moves forward one bar at a time, the same shape a live feed has: the newest bar changes as price inside it moves, then closes and a new one opens. That is what makes it manual backtesting rather than a fast-forward through history: you see only what the market had shown by that bar, decide, and the session will not let you look further ahead before it lets you trade.
The fill rules
- A market order fills at the close of the bar you were looking at when you sent it. That is the price you actually decided on.
- When a stop and a target both sit inside the same bar, the stop is taken. A bar does not say which price came first, and guessing the kinder one turns a backtest into a sales pitch.
- A price that gaps past a stop fills at the open, not at the stop. A stop is an instruction, not a promise, and a weekend gap is exactly when that matters.
- A pending order has to sit on the correct side of the market. A limit that would fill better than the current price, a stop that only triggers once price has run past a level; reversed, the order is refused rather than handing you a fill the market never offered.
The numbers it produces
A finished practice trade uses the journal's own definitions: R-multiple, MFE and MAE, win rate, and the 0-100 score. That is deliberate: a session's result is meant to sit next to a real trading result and mean the same thing, not a separate scoring system that only exists inside Strategy Lab.
What it is not, yet
This page is about the manual lab: a person decides every trade, one bar at a time, on one chart. Automated backtesting (describe a strategy in words and let it run over the history by itself) is live too, with its own page: Describe a strategy in words, get a backtest. Multi-chart practice (1 to 4 charts on one clock, to practise a setup across timeframes or pairs) is available too.
Which plan has it
Strategy Lab is on every plan. What changes is how many sessions you keep at once: 5 on Free, 25 on Trader, 200 on Pro, 500 on Elite and 1,000 on Desk. Delete one to start another. The 14-day trial is Pro, so it keeps 200. Automated backtests run 5, 30, 150, 300 and 500 times a month on the same plans, and multi-chart practice is on every plan. The full list is on /features and the prices on /pricing.
Questions
- 01
Does a Strategy Lab trade touch my real account?
No. A session and its trades never reach a broker. It is a practice account against recorded history, kept in the journal's own units so the result reads the same way.
- 02
How far back can I test?
Up to two years of 1-minute candles on 48 instruments, and some history on 109 in total. The session tells you the exact date it can start from for the instrument you pick.
- 03
Can I replay a session I already ran?
The cursor only moves forward; it does not rewind. Start a new session on the same instrument and dates to walk it again from the start.
- 04
Does the backtest use kinder fill rules than real trading?
No. A stop wins over a target inside the same bar, a gap past a stop fills at the open, and pending orders that sit on the wrong side of the market are refused, the same as the live ticket.
- 05
Is automated backtesting available?
Yes. Describe a strategy in plain words, check the rules FxMind drafts from them, and run it over the history. It uses the same fill rules as this manual lab. See Describe a strategy in words, get a backtest.
Sources
Prices, plans and rules change. Check the company's own page before you pay. Product names belong to their owners and are used here only to say which product we mean.
This article is general information, not investment advice. FxMind gives no buy or sell signals and never opens a trade for you.