Forex Backtesting SoftwareReplay Real FX History, Free to Try

Forex has a personality most tools ignore: the market has sessions. A setup that prints on the London open behaves nothing like the same setup in the dead Asian hours. Spreads, pip values and news windows all matter — and a backtest that doesn't respect them isn't telling you the truth about your edge.

Proper backtesting software lets you replay those sessions candle by candle, so you learn when your edge fires, not just whether it exists.

Start with session behaviour — the classic Asian-range-into-London-expansion, and how price reacts through the London–New York overlap. Test one pair and one setup at a time: EURUSD for clean, liquid structure, GBPUSD for volatility, USDJPY for trend and the JPY pip quirk.

And size every test correctly. A pip is 0.0001 (0.01 on JPY pairs), and the right position depends on your stop distance — the position size calculator handles the pip math so your backtest reflects real risk.

CRTLAB runs in your browser — no MetaTrader, no downloads, no data wrangling. Pick a pair, replay real history one candle at a time, mark your setups by session, and let the app log every trade and score your win rate and average R automatically.

That's a deliberate trade against the paid desktop simulators most FX traders end up comparing it with. If you're weighing one of those, the Forex Tester alternative page lays out what each side genuinely wins on — instrument coverage and tick-level spread modelling against no install and no licence. For the browser-based competitor most FX traders shortlist instead, see the FX Replay alternative page.

All four FX majors — plus the indices, gold, silver, oil, crypto and the US stocks — open on the first chart with the full history on each. There is no licence to buy: stepping the chart forward uses candles, 10,000 free sample first, or unlimited at $14.99 a month.

"Free" means something different at every vendor, and the difference is usually the one thing a forex trader needs. Here is what each free option actually lets you do on an FX pair, and where it stops.

Free-plan limits checked against each vendor's own pages on the date at the top of this page. Vendors change their plans often — confirm before you commit.

Forex trades roughly 24 hours a day, five days a week, so the candle count per week is fixed by your timeframe. Stepping every bar, 10,000 candles is about 21 weeks of 15-minute EURUSD, about 7 weeks of 5-minute, or roughly 7 trading days of 1-minute data. On the 1-hour chart it is over a year and a half.

That arithmetic tells you how to spend the free sample well. Pick the timeframe your entries are actually taken on, not the one that looks most rigorous. A London-open setup read on the 15-minute chart gets you through several months of sessions in one allowance, which is a real sample. The same setup on the 1-minute chart gets you a week and a bit, which is a mood.

If you trade the sessions, go straight to them: the London session backtester and New York session backtester open a chart already framed on the window that matters.