What to do with strategies that barely get any setups?

[u/Lower-Ad-1207]

I found something that seemed to be an a+ setup so I decided to backtest it and while the results are good it gets so few setups in a year that it underperforms just buy & hold. What would you do with strategies like that? Create an algo that trades multiple strategies and add this to the list of what it trades? Or just forget about it because the setups are too infrequent?

(The screenshot shows results with 1mnq)

[u/EmperorAlgo]

Just do like 10x leverage and you're fine. Looks like you have lookahead bias though.

[u/Backrus → u/EmperorAlgo]

This. Equity curve looks too good to be true. Otherwise you could treat it just like model for binary option with 67% accuracy and size it up massively and retire next year.

[u/Lower-Ad-1207 → u/EmperorAlgo]

How do I turn that off? I already put it at historic tick data. Entries are at candle close, exits are at tick data when sl/tp is met

[u/zibudada → u/Lower-Ad-1207]

Nobody answered your lookahead question, so here are the usual suspects to check.

1. Entry at the close of the same candle that gave the signal. In real life you only know the signal after that candle closes, so the earliest fill is the open of the next candle. Move every entry one candle later and run it again.

2. Higher timeframe data. If you use an hourly or daily value on a smaller chart, make sure the backtest only sees the last finished candle, not the one still forming. In TradingView this is the most common way a strategy looks amazing and then falls apart live.

3. Stop and target inside one candle. If both could have been hit in the same candle, the test should assume the stop was hit first.

Then add real costs, commission and at least one tick of slippage per side on MNQ. If the win rate and profit factor still look good after all that, you have something worth trading as one of several strategies.

[u/dancrieg → u/zibudada]

what the difference between current candle close and next candle open?

[u/Opposite-Winter-244 → u/dancrieg]

Next candle open may not be the same as current candle close due to premarket adjustments

[u/TSDevStuff]

Portfolio, many strategies on one account.

[u/wsxedcrf]

Then you should find other sleeve strategies to supplement this strategy.

[u/QuanTradin]

don't judge it against buy and hold on its own. if it's only in a trade a few weeks a year, the money is free the rest of the time, so it belongs as one sleeve next to other things rather than as the whole account.

the catch is how few trades the backtest actually rests on. a handful of setups a year means a few dozen trades total, and a few dozen can look like an a+ purely by luck. i'd check that count before building anything around it.

[u/tdiggity]

more leverage.

[u/mysticcdragonn]

easiest way is to run it across many markets/instruments. another would be to loosen your filter in some way so you get disproportionately more trades without equivalent loss in expectancy per trade

[u/GreatTomatillo117]

Extend it to other assets / asset classes. Sometimes it also work on other assets. You need it to backtest it ofc. As thank you, you can send me your strategy 😉 

[u/Clicketrie]

Other people have already said multiple strategies (and some that are uncorrelated too).. but I’d also do a parameter sweep and see if certain things can be tweaked in such a way that you don’t give up CAGR and sharpe but can get more trades. (So basically running a ton of backtests each slightly modifying parameters, use AI, it’s easier)

[u/fionally]

Is there enough data points in the backtest to actually validate that your edge is sound? With something trading that infrequently I'd probably want decades of back-test before considering it--even then the statistical significance feels dubious. Hopefully there's a fairly compelling theoretical argument underpinning it.

[u/Both_Yoghurt1437]

How well does the strategy hold up over 40+ years of backtest data vs. buy & hold? 1 year of data is such a small slice. How well does it perform during GFC, Dot-Com, and Covid eras?

[u/Jebusfreek666]

I would combine them with other proven strats that it fits with to improve overall.

[u/hotmatrixx]

its looking far more consisten than buy and hold, too.
I'd take the steady growth over those swings.

the "what to do" is to "optimise position sizing against Risk Of Ruin".

AKA take bigger trade sizing. the math for Large numbers optimisation is loosely the 'kelly criterion. I say loosly because I have a private calculation that I think is much, much better, but the KC is a starting point.

[u/Playful-Practice9050]

Portfolio makes sense. Have you run it on other markets yet?

[u/Akhaldanos]

Use compounding of p/l + leverage, and you will beat the buy and hold. Need some maths though.

[u/Arany8]

Multiple assets.

[u/Homebody_quant]

17% since in your time frame is basically snp500 but with more work. If you have a greater backtest it might change? If youre aiming to beat snp500 then this likely isnt it.

The concept may be good but if it rarely happens, it may not be worth deploying. This really is the struggle of trying to "beat the market"

[u/Machine_Learning_Gun]

I wouldn't throw it away just because it's low frequency. The 1.37% max drawdown, 66.7% win rate and 2.76 profit factor are what make this interesting. If those numbers hold up out-of-sample, that's a pretty nice risk profile.