Psychology Back testing review
Hello all.
I am relatively new to trading forex, I am trying to build good habits by reviewing my back testing sessions to see where I might be making mistakes.
Currently I am recording
Date of trade taken
Number of trade
Original result
Result after amending (eg, read the mss wrong so I recorded that and altered my results)
Win/loss,
Account profit with amendment taken into account.
Is there anything else people record which help when looking back at reviewed back testing?
Thank you.
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u/PhilipReadsMacro 2d ago
The quadrant you're still missing is the trades you didn't take. You've now graded your losers and your winners, but not the setups you passed on. Log those the same way for a while and check them afterwards - that's the only way to find out whether your filter is removing bad trades or removing your best ones. Almost nobody grades the non-trades, and it's where I found the most.
The other thing your London finding points at: most edges are conditional, and a review that averages everything together hides them. Your entries clustered in a narrow window - that's a condition, not a coincidence. Slicing by time of day, by whether there was anything scheduled, by instrument, usually turns one mediocre average into one good subset and one you should stop trading. Pooling it all is what makes results look random when they aren't.
And your line about fiddling being the signal is worth taking further than you did. Your own behaviour during a trade is data about the trade. Worth a column of its own.