Author: Ilan

Eureka! You’ve just found the holy grail of market indicators. The indicator of indicators which over the past few days has perfectly called each 30 minute top and low in the e-mini S&P futures… Now what?  Time to put some real money on the thing and retire to the islands…. Not so fast!

Your strategy may be looking good over the past few days, or even months or years. But to really get comfortable with it, wouldn’t you rather know how it has done over many, many years. And once you’ve done that, wouldn’t you rather see it work for a period of time on the current market before putting real money to work.

If you answered yes to either of those, welcome to the world of trading systems – because backtesting and forward testing are two of the biggest advantages of trading systems. The ability to see what would have happened, and what is happening – BEFORE putting real money to work.  And then, the kicker… tracking your live account versus the trading system to see how you’re doing with that live money once you’re ready to take that next step.

Backtesting

Becktesting is just what it sounds like. Observing how a system would have performed going ‘back’ in the past, using historical prices to see when a system would have gotten in and gotten out, bought and sold, been stopped out, and so forth. By running the system backwards in time, an investor can compile all the different trades and calculate how much the system would have made and lost month by month, year by year – and from there calculate the statistics such as annual return and maximum drawdown and volatility and so forth we all use to gauge a model’s abilities. On the iSystems platform, every model, every model is backtested as far back as possible, ranging from 2001 to 2007, and shows in the equity curve graph and monthly perf table with a white background.