How to Easily Download Historical Data in the MetaTrader 4 Terminal
We often need historical data to check indicators, expert advisors, and trading strategies on history. How to upload this data to MetaTrader 4? Let’s find out how to do it quickly and correctly.
Some indicators or expert advisors (EA’s) may signal to you that they do not have enough historical data for calculations. Some of them may give an error or make incorrect calculations without even informing you about it.
If your terminal is new or recently installed, then with a high degree of probability, you have not yet managed to upload historical data to the terminal.
How to Download Historical Data
Step 1 – We must open the History Center in the terminal. There are two ways to do this:
a) From the terminal menu Tools > History Center
b) Press hotkey F2 in the terminal
Step 2 – Double click on the currency pair that you want to download, to be sure select M1 timeframe, and click the “Download” button:
Downloading data may take several minutes, especially if you have never done this before.
Step 3 – Repeat Step 2 for all the pairs you need, then restart the terminal!
Usually, this is the end of the process. But sometimes you may need to limit the amount of historical data or increase it instead.
How to Manually Limit the Amount of Downloaded Data
Why do we even need to limit the amount of data downloaded? Let’s find out.
First, we set the maximum possible values of the variables Max bars in history and Max bars in chart.
You can change this numbers using the drop-down menu or manually.
Don’t forget to restart the terminal after each configuration changing so that the changes take effect!
Then we open the History Center and see how far back the data goes.
This depth of history is rarely needed, and it takes up a lot of disk space (especially if you download data for a large number of trading instruments). Therefore, we can limit the Max bars in history to get the period we need without having unnecessary information.
For example:
Max bars in history = 500000 is approximately equal to 1.5 years of history.
Max bars in history = 750000 is approximately equal to 2 years of history.
Thus, if you do not plan to use the entire depth of historical data, the value Max bars in history = 1200000 will give you a history depth of 3 years. Usually, this is enough in most cases.
