Back Testing Your Trading System-Know These Shocking Limitations
Saturday, February 27th, 2010Developing a trading system is not easy. It requires first of all good trading experience. Than you need to test your trading system under live trading conditions. It might take time as well as involve the risk of losing money. To overcome this difficulty in testing a trading system or a trading strategy, backtesting has been developed. Backtesting is possible with the use of software. A trading system might comprise of a set of two or more indicators with a set of rules that tell when to enter or exit the trade.
How to do backtesting? Using a backtesting software makes it very simple and easy. Backtesting uses historical data to test the performance of the trading system under the past market conditions.
Now, back testing is done with historical data. What this means is that although your trading system might perform very well with back testing, it may not work in the present market. Market conditions keep on changing and what worked in the past may not work in the present. In the same way, what didn’t work in the past may start working now.
So when you look at back testing results, you should look at them with scepticism. But it doesn’t mean that backtesting is entirely useless! What we can say is that no two trades are exactly alike.
Back testing can give you a feel how a particular market behaves under certain conditions. Back testing can also spot you certain general characteristics of the market like the seasonal trends and market tendencies.
On the other hand, you might not find much seasonal trends in the currencies and bond market. Some though talk of the January Effect but this effect is not that pronounced now a days. In case of stocks, stock prices tend to rise at the end of each month and the first few days of each new month as institutional investors tend to put new money to work during that time frame.
US Dollar Index trendlines might last for months to years. In other markets too backtesting can help you figure out important trends that lasts for last times. Backtesting can help you figure out how long a trend might last in a particular market.
Now when you back test your trading system and the set of indicators, you can check their accuracy. For example, if you using a trading system based on moving average crossovers, you can back test it using different combinations. Then monitor each combination under live conditions to see which works the best.
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