How to Conduct a Trading Strategy Back Test
By: Casey Stubbs of Winners Edge Trading
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I almost tried to hide the title of this article or change it to something like “How to Make 637 Pips on a Slow Day” to trick traders into reading it. Why would I do that? Because this is a boring subject that most traders will run from, but oh how they need it. Conducting proper back testing can change your forex trading forever. Before you leave I will let you in on a secret I am going to have complete back test and I am going to share the strategy so this is going to have a ton of good stuff.

This article is going to discuss how to do a back test to determine if a strategy is profitable before you start to trade it. The key word is BEFORE you trade it. The problem with most traders I know is that they usually start trading with no, testing at all heck they don’t even have a plan or a strategy. I am not trying to be cruel here but I deal with traders every day and I am asking them these key questions to try to find out where they are going wrong.

So this post is much needed and I hope that you heed the words that have been written so that you may learn and be profitable.

There are some benefits to back testing a strategy before trading. The first benefit is that you will know ahead of time if a strategy actually works and if you are wasting your time or not even before you start trading live. Another great reason to back test is that you learn the strategy very well before you actually start to trade, believe me after a couple hours of straight back testing you will know you strategy inside and out. Back testing a trading strategy also allows you to test different variables with your strategy to see if changing something will increase your profits. The two small drawbacks to back testing are that the results cannot be guaranteed in the future so if you find a good one your results might not be what you actually expect when you start to trade. The other drawback is that to do it right it takes a lot of time and hard work but that can be a benefit as well.

Steps To Start Back Testing

The first thing you need even before you start back testing is a forex trading strategy. I have include a link to for your convenience to a Forex trading strategy website in case you need a strategy to test. Once you have your strategy you have to make sure that you understand all of the entry requirements, money management, exit requirements, and all of the indicators you will need for this strategy.

Once you fully understand the strategy you need to choose a pair that you are going to test on for my example I am going test on the Aud/Usd. You also have to determine how far back you are going to test. I recommend testing it a minimum of 2 months but you should probably do more.

For the example I am going to test I am going to test for one month.

Here is the my strategy for this example:

Indicators Used

1 Hr Chart

7 and 27 Simple Moving Average

Macd 8 17 9

Rsi 14

Entry Requirements

Enter on a Cross of the 7 and 27 Go in the direction of the cross.

Filters to keep us out of bad Trades

Also RSI Must be above 50 pointing up for a long and below 50 pointing down for a short.

If RSI is above 65 no trade on a long

If RSI is below 35 no trade on a short

Macd above 0 for a long and below 0 for a short.

Wait for the candle to close before entry.

If the Entry candle is larger than +50 no trade

Stops Loss And Take Profit Information

Stop loss 3 pips above previous candle to the entry

Move Stop to +30 when the price gets to +50

Trail Stop by 27 MA candle after the price gets past +30

Money Management

Chart Two Next I am going to look at all the times I think the price is going to trigger a trade and mark them on the chart.

Now we are almost ready to start the back test but before we do that we need to create a spreadsheet that will have all of the data we record from the backtest.

Here is an example of the first trade I recorded.

Now I go through and do the same thing with each trade. After I have completed the entire back test and log the results I look at the numbers in the speadsheet and make my observations of the strategy.

Here is a graph of the performance.

So now that we see the strategy is a winner, now it is time to fine tune it to make it better. The strategy was profitable but if I made some small adjustments it could be much better. If I add one or two more winning trades to the mix or get some more pips per trade, that would be a large increase in profit over time.