Hello all.
I am absolutely new to Metastock and fairly new to stock trading in general. Here is a question about strange results I had on Metastock 10 using the Enhanced System Tester. I will give exact values to help in answering and even trying it yourself.

Going trough the manuals I was trying the one system on many securities and many systems on one security options.

I decided to try all 26 PS systems on China Mobile (CHL symbol) with a date range for last full 3 years (2005, 2006, 2007) and 2008 so far. So, the first date was Jan 03, 2005 (first working day) and the last date Feb 22, 2008 (last working day before the weekend).

I used all standard options using money not points test, and the only change I made was to select using only long positions.

The top result for CHL was the Pattern Trading System 1, with profit of 75.95% in 99 trades. The stated Buy&Hold profit by the software was 58.35%.

It looks normal until you take the calculator in your hand. By my humble knowledge Buy&Hold means buying on the first day (Jan 03, 2005) and selling on the last (Feb 22, 2008). I even checked the Metastock help file to confirm that and it said the same. However the numbers are totally different. The price of CHL on Jan 03, 2005 was $16.31 and on Feb 22, 2008 was $74.80. That makes around 4.5 times more, in other words net profit of approx 350% (net without the initial investment). At the same time Metastock showed B&H profit of only 58.35% for the same period.

The first and main question: How is this possible? Am I doing something wrong? Is my logic wrong?

Depending on the answer, the next question would be: If the 58.35% value is wrong (and the B&H profit is definitely more than 58%) should I trust the 75.95% value as correct? Would the mentioned system earn 75.95% on CHL in that period?

Sorry for waste of time if the answer is obvious but to me it isn't. Thanks in advance for any clarification and I hope someone will help me understand because at this moment I feel like I can't trust the values these tests show.

Best regards.

Thank you very much Pyradius. You got it spot on.

I paid more attention during the test setup instead of leaving everything on default and after changing the Default Size to % of available equity and leaving the value at 100 I got the expected results.

If anyone else new to the software has the same problem that is what they should do. Additionally on the button More you can enter broker comission values on the Broker tab to make the results even more precise. Some system tests come back with a lot of trades and the comissions can cost a lot.

Cheers.