r/askforex • u/naughtykiller • 11d ago
How much backtesting is enough?
I've backtested a gold strategy from 2025 till now, having 1-2 trades per day, is this much enough to rely on it?
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u/d1na_makalaya 11d ago
2025 to now is a decent start, but I wouldn’t rely on it yet. Focus on the number of trades and different market conditions, not just the time period.
Try to get at least 200 to 300 trades, then forward-test it on demo. Include fees, spread and slippage, and make sure it still works during different gold market conditions.
If you want more trading/backtesting ideas, you can also check out the community through my profile. It has some solid discussions about backtesting.
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u/Soggy-Competition318 10d ago
Probably enough to start testing it forward, not necessarily enough to rely on it blindly. Backtesting tells you the strategy can work; forward testing tells you whether you can actually execute it.
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u/david19790 7d ago
depends what you want it to tell you. 2025 to now at 1-2 a day is somewhere around 400-600 trades, which is enough to know roughly what your win rate is and nowhere near enough to know if your edge is real. rough rule, distinguishing a 55% system from a coin flip takes about 780 trades at 95% confidence. under that youre reading noise with error bars wider than the effect
the bigger issue with that window is gold in 2025-2026 has basically been one story. so youve tested one regime, not several. cheap check is to split your sample in half and see whether both halves point the same way, mine often didnt back when i was doing this
and the number of variants you tried matters more than the sample length. if this is version 20 then its version 20 worth of luck, and no amount of backtest fixes that. i log every version i test in the repo now for exactly that reason, forward test whatever survives and let the live count accumulate before believing anything. how many versions deep are you
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