Free backtesting software and market replay

CRTLAB is a bar-by-bar market replay for traders who test by hand. You pick a market and a date, the chart rewinds to it, and you step forward one candle at a time with the right-hand side of the screen genuinely hidden. You place the entry, the stop and the target as you go, and the journal keeps the record. No card, no download, and the replay engine is not the part we charge for.

It exists because the usual answer — code your rules, run an equity curve — only works if your edge is a set of rules. Most discretionary traders' edge is not. It lives in how they read structure, and the only way to test that is to sit in front of the chart with the future covered up and do it a few hundred times.

What you get without paying

21 markets — the forex majors and crosses, the index futures, gold, silver, oil and the major crypto pairs — on every timeframe from one minute to one month, with a two-week window of history on each. Pro widens it to 38 markets, adds 17 US stocks, and opens ten years of history per pair. That is the whole difference: how much history and how many markets, never whether the tool works.

Why replay beats waiting for the market

A setup that appears twice a week takes most of a year to produce a sample worth trusting. In replay it takes an evening. That compression is the entire argument: not that screen time stops mattering, but that you can stop paying for it in calendar months and in the money you lose finding out that a setup you liked does not survive fifty attempts.

It is also the only honest way to find out how you behave. An equity curve cannot tell you that you move your stop when a candle goes against you. Replay can, because you are the one moving it.

Open a chart on the thing you came here for

Every link below opens a live chart that is already what it says — the market loaded, the timeframe set, the overlay switched on — in a single click, with no account. That is the same session a paying customer uses; the only thing the free plan limits is how far back the history goes.

Common questions

Is CRTLAB actually free?

Yes, and without a card. The free plan gives you 21 markets, every timeframe from 1 minute to 1 month, and a two-week window of history on each one. Pro widens that to 38 markets — including 17 US stocks — and opens up ten years of history per pair. Nothing about the replay engine itself is gated.

Do I need to download anything?

No. It runs in the browser. There is a desktop build if you prefer a dedicated window, but it is the same product and nothing needs installing to start.

How is this different from paper trading?

Paper trading runs at the speed of the market, so a year of practice takes a year. Replay runs at the speed of your mouse. You can put a hundred trades through a setup in an evening instead of waiting a hundred sessions for them to appear — and you can do it on 2018 as easily as on this morning.

Can I test a strategy I did not code?

That is the point. This is manual, discretionary backtesting: you read the chart, you place the entry, stop and target yourself, and the journal records what happened. If your edge lives in how you read structure rather than in a set of rules a machine could follow, an automated backtester cannot test it and this can.

What markets can I practise on?

Forex majors and crosses, the index futures (NAS100, US30, SP500, GER40), gold and silver, oil, and the major crypto pairs — 21 of them on the free plan. Pro adds the rest, including US single stocks.