Historical Data

Historical data is a collection of key statistics pertaining to the pricing of a financial instrument over a given period of time.

This often takes the form of a comprehensive database or spreadsheet, which can be used in conjunction with broker trading platforms to display the data in the form of visual charts.

Historical data itself is typically composed of the opening price, highest price, lowest price, closing price and volume of an instrument for a specific timeframe.

The main purpose of traders acquiring historical data is for back-testing a strategy.

Without knowing how one’s strategy fared in the past, a trader is essentially assuming a large degree of risk via speculative means.

The lowest level of historical data is tick data, and is the most useful to a trader. Above this, the data is based on timeframes, depending on which market and with which platform one is trading.

Using Historical Data in Forex Trading

For example, in the retail foreign exchange market which is dominated by the MetaTrader platform, there are certain key timeframes that are used.

This includes the one minute (M1), five minutes (M5), fifteen minutes (M15), thirty minutes (M30), one hour (H1), four hours (H4), daily, (D1), weekly (W1) and monthly, (MN).

A lot of forex brokers now offer the ability to download historical data on these timeframes from their servers, (sometimes for a cost), which can then be imported to the platform itself to be ready for testing.

Not only can data be imported to a platform, it can also be exported, with most platforms offering the trader a variety of import and export formats, such as CSV, HTM, PRN, HST or TXT.