Edge Builder
Build modes
Edge Builder has three build modes with increasing depth — Builder, Tester and Explorer. All three start from the same thing: a blueprint that describes your strategy.
Builder
Builder turns your blueprint into a compiled Expert Advisor and runs a single backtest. It's a straight, deterministic pipeline: blueprint → code generation → compile → one backtest → report. It uses your parameters as-is — it does not optimise them and does not run statistical validation.
- You provide: a complete blueprint — strategy description, asset, timeframe, entry/exit rules and risk settings.
- You get: the
.ex5, a.setparameter file, optional.mq5source, and a single-backtest report (equity curve, profit factor, Sharpe, max drawdown, win rate, trade count). - Choose it when you know exactly what you want and just need it turned into an EA quickly and cheaply.
Tester
Tester does everything Builder does, then puts the strategy through formal statistical validation designed to expose overfitting before you risk capital.
- Walk-forward analysis across rolling in-sample / out-of-sample windows.
- A final hold-out set kept untouched until the very end.
- Deflated Sharpe Ratio, which corrects for multiple testing.
- Probability of Backtest Overfit (PBO).
- Monte Carlo permutation over the trade sequence.
- Parameter optimisation across a range you define (or let the engine pick).
On top of the Builder outputs you get a robustness report with a pass/fail for each check and an overall verdict. Read Validation & metrics for how to interpret it.
Choose it when you have a clear system and want quantitative confirmation that it holds up out-of-sample.
Explorer
Explorer is an agentic loop. Instead of building one fixed idea, it generates alternative variants of your blueprint, tests them, reads the diagnostics, and decides its next move — refining the best candidate, discarding dead ends, and converging on a winner.
- You provide: a blueprint that can be only partially specified — Explorer fills in fields you leave on “let the engine pick”.
- You get: the best Expert Advisor it finds, a report with the history of what it tried and why, and a ranked shortlist of alternative variants.
- It stops when it finds a variant that passes validation, when it hits the time/iteration budget for your plan, or when it concludes there is no robust edge to be found.
- Choose it when you have an intuition (“trade the London open on EUR/USD”) but not the exact indicators, filters or rules — and you want the engine to search for you.
Depth tiers
Each mode runs at a depth tier — Fast, Standard or Deep — which trades build time and cost for thoroughness.Cost & time at a glance
Cost rises with depth: Builder is the most affordable, Tester sits in the middle, and Explorer is the most powerful and most expensive. The engine calculates the exact cost from your blueprint and shows it before you confirm — you're never billed by surprise. Typical run times: Builder a few minutes, Tester fifteen minutes to about ninety, Explorer thirty minutes to a few hours. See Credits & billing for how pricing works.