Backtesting
Intermediate5 min read
Backtest to Live: The Complete Pre-Launch Checklist
The gap between a good backtest and a working strategy is filled with specific, checkable items. This is the list.
13 in-depth guides
Backtesting and Strategy Validation, Done Honestly
A backtest is a hypothesis test, not a sales pitch. These guides show how professionals try to break their own strategies before the market does it for them.
Intermediate guides
Assumes you know order types, charts, and basic risk sizing.
Backtesting
Intermediate6 min read
Backtesting Guide: How to Test a Strategy Honestly
A backtest is a hypothesis test, not a sales pitch. The goal is to break your strategy before the market does it with your money.
Backtesting
Intermediate5 min read
Benchmarking a Strategy: Compared to What?
A 14 percent return means nothing on its own. The only meaningful question is what you could have earned with the same risk doing something simpler.
Backtesting
Intermediate5 min read
Forward Testing: The Only Truly Clean Evidence
Forward testing uses data that did not exist when the strategy was built. It is slow, and it is the only evidence no amount of backtesting can substitute for.
Backtesting
Intermediate5 min read
In-Sample vs Out-of-Sample: Protecting Your Only Clean Data
Out-of-sample data is the only honest test you have, and you can only use it once. Most traders spend it without realising.
Backtesting
Intermediate5 min read
Look-Ahead Bias: Using Information You Could Not Have Had
Look-ahead bias is the most damaging backtesting error because it is invisible: the code runs, the results look excellent, and none of it was achievable.
Backtesting
Intermediate6 min read
Overfitting in Trading: How Backtests Lie
Given enough attempts, random data produces a beautiful equity curve. Overfitting is not a mistake you make once; it is the default outcome of iteration.
Backtesting
Intermediate5 min read
Survivorship Bias: Testing Only on the Winners
Backtesting on today’s index members means testing a strategy on companies selected for having survived. The bias is large, systematic, and easy to miss.
Backtesting
Intermediate5 min read
Trading Performance Metrics: What Each One Hides
Every performance metric compresses a complex return stream into one number, which means every metric hides something. Knowing what each one hides is the skill.
Advanced guides
Assumes comfort with statistics, code, or derivatives.
Backtesting
Advanced5 min read
Market Data Quality: The Foundation Nobody Checks
A strategy is only as good as its data. Most backtest errors that look like logic problems are data problems that nobody checked for.
Backtesting
Advanced5 min read
Monte Carlo Simulation for Trading Strategies
Your backtest shows one ordering of trades. Monte Carlo shows the thousands of orderings that were equally likely, which is where the real risk lives.
Backtesting
Advanced5 min read
Transaction Cost Modelling: The Number That Decides Viability
Most strategies that look profitable before costs are unprofitable after them. Cost modelling is not a refinement; it is the test.
Backtesting
Advanced4 min read
Walk-Forward Analysis: Testing How a Strategy Would Have Been Run
Walk-forward simulates periodically re-fitting a strategy and trading it forward. It is the closest a backtest gets to describing how you would really operate.
Every guide in this category
- Backtest to Live: The Complete Pre-Launch Checklist
- Backtesting Guide: How to Test a Strategy Honestly
- Benchmarking a Strategy: Compared to What?
- Forward Testing: The Only Truly Clean Evidence
- In-Sample vs Out-of-Sample: Protecting Your Only Clean Data
- Look-Ahead Bias: Using Information You Could Not Have Had
- Market Data Quality: The Foundation Nobody Checks
- Monte Carlo Simulation for Trading Strategies
- Overfitting in Trading: How Backtests Lie
- Survivorship Bias: Testing Only on the Winners
- Trading Performance Metrics: What Each One Hides
- Transaction Cost Modelling: The Number That Decides Viability
- Walk-Forward Analysis: Testing How a Strategy Would Have Been Run
Other categories
Trading Foundations
Plain-English foundations for new traders: what a trading strategy is, how markets work, order types, timeframes, and how to build a first rule-based plan.
Trading Strategy Types
In-depth guides to every major trading strategy type, from trend following and mean reversion to pairs trading, arbitrage, market making, and event-driven trading.
Indicators & Signals
How technical indicators are calculated, what they actually measure, and how to turn moving averages, RSI, MACD, ATR, and volume tools into tested trading rules.
Chart Patterns & Price Action
Candlestick patterns, classical chart patterns, support and resistance, and price action structure, each with objective definitions you can actually code and backtest.
Strategies by Asset Class
The strategies that actually fit each market: stocks, ETFs, options, futures, forex, crypto, commodities, bonds, and index products, with costs, hours, and leverage compared.
Risk & Money Management
Position sizing, stop losses, drawdown control, correlation risk, and the maths of ruin, explained so you can size trades with a formula instead of a feeling.
Algorithmic & Quant Trading
How to turn a discretionary idea into code: signal design, factor models, execution algorithms, data pipelines, machine learning pitfalls, and production monitoring.
Market Mechanics & Execution
Order books, matching engines, order types, spreads, slippage, market makers, settlement, and the trading session structure that decides what your fill really costs.
Trading Psychology & Process
The behavioural side of trading: loss aversion, revenge trading, overconfidence, journaling, routine design, and the process controls that keep rules intact under stress.