Candle-by-Candle Replay — Trade the Past Like It's Live

What candle-by-candle replay is

Instead of staring at a finished chart where every move is already obvious, replay drops you into the past with the right edge of the chart hidden. You step forward one candle at a time and only ever see what you'd have seen live. When your setup forms, you mark your entry, stop and target in the moment — then step forward and watch it play out.

Why it beats scrolling a chart

This is the single biggest thing that separates a real backtest from a fantasy one: hindsight bias. Scroll a static chart and you can quietly use information you'd never have had in real time — you "knew" it was going to bounce, so of course the entry looks perfect. That quietly turns a 45% strategy into a 90% illusion.

Bar-by-bar replay makes cheating impossible. You commit before you see the next candle, exactly like live trading — so the win rate and average R you walk away with are real. It's also faster than a demo account: you compress months of setups into an afternoon instead of waiting for them in real time.

How replay works in CRTLAB

Pick one of eight markets — indices, forex, gold or crypto — drop into real historical price, and step or fast-play through it. Mark your trades as they set up, and CRTLAB logs each one and scores your win rate, average R and profit factor automatically. No downloads, no spreadsheets, no MetaTrader.

The free tier gives you every market on the most recent two weeks; Pro unlocks ten years of history so you can run as many reps as your discipline allows.