How To Back Test Your Trading System? Know These Shocking Limitations!

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Developing 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.

For this you can do back testing. Back testing is a method that uses historical data to test how well your indicators work in a particular market. You can use back testing software that enables you to look at the past market data and test how well the indicators and your trading system have worked in the past market.

There are many problems with historical data. There is no slippage in backtesting. Slippage is one of the most important problem that a trader faces while trading live. The other problem that the backtest ignores is the widening of spreads under volatile market conditions. So backtesting results are no guarantee that the trading system will perform well under live market conditions. Things that worked in the past might not work now. Similarly something that didn’t work in the past, may work now! You never know!

What we can say is that no two trades are exactly alike. 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!

Some markets are highly seasonal. For example, if you are a commodity trader and tend to trade agricultural commodities like the grain, seed or the livestock, these have a fixed planting and harvesting cycles.

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.

Backtesting can help you figure out how long a trend might last in a particular market. For example, 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.

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.

Mr. Ahmad Hassam has done Masters from Harvard University. Download these Forex Scalping Cheatsheets FREE! Read this shocking FREE 40 page PDF FRWC Brutal Truth Report that exposes everything about trading robots!

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