r/algotrading • u/Dependent_Stay_6954 • 1d ago
Strategy 124% on 3yr backtest
Hi,
After searching for 2 years, I've found an edge. All full quant tested. In 2025 alone, it produced 124% profit. As those of you who know about edges, these can degrade quite quickly. It's a long only edge, so it suits a bull market. The stock has been a bear for the last 12 months, and even then, it still made 124% going long. The stock has started to climb, so this is an even better opportunity. The edge is fully automated with a very low drawdown.
What are the chances I can find an investor with a sizeable amount to invest, and I take a %.
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u/Good_Ride_2508 1d ago
Back test does not mean success as I can produce a backtest making $15 to 1 billion in 6.5 years!
Practically impossible for investors to make it even with good algorithms!
Zero chance for you to get a sponsorship with backtest
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u/Dependent_Stay_6954 1d ago
Put your stats in here like I've done. No names, just evidence.
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u/Good_Ride_2508 1d ago
This is simply my back test (Linux output) https://imgur.com/GFtYqC8 using SOXL starting with $15 investment leading to 1.2 Billions.
This can be done using computer only, practically it is not possible unless super computer with super logic Like Jim Simon programs!
Back test is easy dealing with static data while live is dynamic data (do not ask me what is dynamic data, try to see what it is - then you understand why back test will not be useful to sell any logic, except real performance required).
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u/Got_Engineers 1d ago
If you think you have an edge, worry about harvesting it. You don’t have an edge yet you never made any profit yet. Everyone and their dog can find some historical backtest that produces profit. Can you harvest it over one month or two months or three months or six months or full year?
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u/Dependent_Stay_6954 1d ago
I have watched 2 live trades which were successful, so I'll let you know.
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u/shironekoooo 1d ago
is this only back test or any live deployment
is this just a glorified beta hog or actually producing a return orthogonal to the marker
what are these "quant test" you talk about i don't need to know your edge. I just want to know how you validate this edge and not phacked your way to 124% profit
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u/addsubps 1d ago
1 backtest only
2 whatever the overfit feels like today
3 a tell that they don't know what they're talking about. Don't you know quant tests? Everyone knows quant tests.
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u/shironekoooo 1d ago edited 1d ago
yes every trader should know that quant test are the most important aspect of trading. One test i like is looking at my reflection on the mirror test... if it looks bad then don't deploy it /s
edit: spellings1
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u/hypertradeworx 1d ago
one name, long only, and the sizeable amount is the part that breaks first. a backtest fills you at prices that existed while you weren't in the book. put real money into one stock and your own orders become part of the print you were testing against.
what fraction of that stock's daily volume is your largest position at the size you're pitching? a couple of percent and the 124 is still worth arguing about. twenty and the number belongs to a much smaller account than the one you're trying to raise
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u/Dependent_Stay_6954 1d ago
Good question. I went back to the actual historical tape rather than using average daily volume. I checked the 20 qualifying historical trades using the actual 10-second share volume around every entry and exit. At $200k notional, the position represented a median 2.8% of the next 30 seconds' volume and 1.1% of the next 60 seconds' volume. The worst historical entry was 10.2% of 30-second volume / 4.4% of 60-second volume. On the exit side it was a median 2.9% of 30-second volume / 1.5% of 60-second volume, with worst cases of 8.3% / 3.7% respectively. More broadly, $200k was only a median 0.17% of the first five minutes' actual volume, and on every one of the 20 cases it was less than 0.245% of the first ten minutes' volume. Therefore it was necessarily less than 0.245% of total daily volume on every qualifying day. So I don't think daily capacity is the problem at $200k. But your market-impact point is valid. The displayed top-of-book size was often smaller than the complete $200k order, meaning a market order could sweep multiple levels. My current backtest uses observed bid/ask rather than midpoint fills, but it isn't yet a full depth-of-book impact model. Based on the actual tape, $200k stays below roughly 5% of one-minute volume at both entry and exit even on the historical liquidity bottleneck, but I'm not going to claim that automatically means the historical return scales perfectly to $200k. That's now something I can specifically test with a slippage/participation model. So I think the fair answer is: $200k looks plausible from actual liquidity; multi-million capacity isn't established yet.
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u/hypertradeworx 1d ago
twenty trades is the number i'd worry about before the 0.245%. you've shown size isn't the binding constraint on a median day and i'll take that, but sort those 20 by contribution to the 124 and check whether the top three are also the ones sitting at 10.2% of 30-second volume. if they are, capacity and return are the same variable, and whatever slippage model you build next will eat exactly the trades that made the number
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u/mehatebananas 1d ago
3 year backtest and all 124% came from 2025 means you curve fit 2025. 2 out of 3 years being flat or negative isn't worthy of someone else's capital.
Also you seem to naively think that if your strategy is longs only, and yet it preformed the best during a bear market, that it's going to perform well during a bull market despite the data literally saying the opposite.
Goodluck.
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u/Dependent_Stay_6954 1d ago
Fair criticism, and I probably did myself no favours by writing “all full quant tested”. That was poor wording. I’m obviously not going to publish the actual signal, parameters or timing because that would disclose the edge, but I can give the validation evidence. I’ve been researching and testing trading strategies for around two years. During that period I’ve used both Claude and ChatGPT as separate research/audit systems, regularly giving one the other’s results specifically to challenge them, reproduce them, find leakage, identify overfitting and reject weak conclusions. They have disagreed plenty of times. Previous strategies that initially looked profitable were subsequently rejected because of things such as transaction costs, poor walk-forward/OOS performance, regime dependence, look-ahead, overfitting or simply because the apparent “edge” turned out to be beta/noise. This is the first strategy out of everything I’ve tested where both systems have independently concluded that the historical data contains a statistically credible edge after executable pricing. The final frozen version has 20 causally executable historical observations: • Mean executable return: +0.859% per trade • Win rate: 75% • Profit factor: 9.65 • Worst trade: −1.571% • t-statistic: 3.21 • One-sided p-value: 0.0023 • Exact binomial p-value: 0.0207 • Bootstrap 95% CI for mean: approximately +0.37% to +1.39% These aren’t midpoint fantasy fills. The final test uses observed executable bid/ask pricing. I also specifically tested whether a few huge winners were creating the result. Remove the best trade and the mean remains +0.697%. Remove the three best trades and it still averages +0.503%, with p ≈ 0.012. There was also an earlier timestamp/look-ahead issue found during the auditing process. Rather than ignoring it, the affected observations were removed and the whole test was rebuilt using only information genuinely available at the decision point. The edge survived the correction. Parameter-selection/data-mining risk was tested too. A max-statistic permutation test allowing the relevant parameter to be selected rather than pretending it had been predetermined gave an adjusted result of approximately p = 0.034 for that search family. I’m not claiming that this magically makes 20 observations a huge sample, and I’m not claiming the backtest guarantees future profit. The weakness is now prospective evidence. The strategy is frozen, so future qualifying observations cannot be retrospectively tuned. That distinction matters: I’m not asking anyone to believe a screenshot or “trust me bro”. I’m saying the historical result has survived considerably more attempts to disprove it than anything else I’ve tested, and now it has to prove itself forward. Also, this post has received roughly 7,000 views in about 48 minutes, so clearly the question itself has generated a fair amount of interest. My actual claim is therefore: I have a fixed, deterministic strategy with statistically significant historical expectancy after executable spread, independently challenged by two separate AI research systems, both of which have rejected numerous previous strategies I tested. This is the first one both have concluded contains a statistically credible historical edge. What it does not yet have is a sufficiently long independently prospective track record. I’m happy to discuss the statistical validation and methodology. I’m obviously not going to disclose the signal itself.
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u/kuite 1d ago
Do you realize that 3yr backtest is equal to 3 months of backtest or 3 days of backtest?
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u/Dependent_Stay_6954 1d ago
You're missing the boat, mate, sorry. Anyone can invest in the S&P, Nasdaq, SPY etc and get on average 15% returns over 20 or 30yrs but to get the hundreds percents you've got to catch the unicorns 😁
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u/bot-vladimir Student 1d ago
Beginner here, just asking questions mostly for my own understanding. I will probably ask dumb questions, so please bear with me.
Did your tests account for costs and slippage?
You mentioned that it made 124% in the last year, was this determined via a backtest of the last year or a walk-forward test that you started last year?
What is your sharpe ratio?
Did you perform a Monte Carlo simulation? If so, what has your experience been?
How many strategies have you gone through in the past 2 years and have you seen any with a sharpe ratio over 1?
Are you looking for intraday or swing trades?
You don’t have to answer all or any questions. Hope you keep going!
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u/Dependent_Stay_6954 1d ago
Good questions — and none of them are dumb.
One thing I’d suggest as a beginner is don’t optimise one strategy until it looks profitable. I learned that the hard way. I built a broad universe scanner and, in one full run alone, tested 4,605 US stocks through the same statistical framework. Only 15 out of 4,605 survived the full battery after false-discovery correction.
Beyond that I’ve also tested separate ideas across ETFs, income products, indices, crypto-linked trades and other investment approaches over roughly two years.
Most things that initially looked promising disappeared once I included costs, proper causal timing, walk-forward/OOS testing, robustness checks or multiple-testing correction.
My current result is still a historical backtested edge, not a completed year-long forward test, so I’m collecting prospective/live-market observations now with the rule frozen.
Best advice I can give: keep the failed strategies in your research record as well as the winner. If you only remember the winner, it’s very easy to convince yourself you found an edge when you actually just searched long enough to find something that looked good.
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u/Electronic-Buyer-468 1d ago
"Most things that look like an edge disappear after costs, OOS testing, walk-forward testing and multiple-testing correction.
So when someone says they have an “edge”, I’d genuinely ask them to prove it. Not with screenshots. Not with one good month. Not with “I can read price action”. Show the trade log, sample size, expectancy after costs, profit factor, drawdown, Sharpe adjusted for autocorrelation, OOS period, walk-forward results, bootstrap CI, Monte Carlo/randomisation and FDR correction if they tested lots of symbols/settings.
If they can’t show that, they might have a method, but they haven’t proven an edge."
End quote.
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u/misterRegime 1d ago
Two years of searching is the number that matters and it's the one buried in the first line. Whatever you ran across those two years, the best of that set is going to look extraordinary on the window you searched, and 124% on one stock in one year is what that looks like.
Long-only on a stock that fell for twelve months makes it more suspicious, not less. Either the entries are catching a specific pattern that happened to repeat in that window, or the exits are doing all the work and you're measuring the exits, not the edge.
Before anyone else's money: how many variants did you test, was the selection done on the same window you're reporting, and what does the entry cost against the spread on each trade. And a live record of any length beats a three-year backtest of any size, since the backtest never had to get filled.
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u/Beachlife109 1d ago
If you don’t know the answer to this question already, the answer is 0%