Your trading system needs thorough testing before you decide to trade live with it. A trading system might comprise of a set of indicators. You need to know how well your trading system and its set of indicators work in a particular market.
For this you can do back testing. Back testing is a method that uses historical data to test how well your indicators work in a particular market. You can use back testing software that enables you to look at the past market data and test how well the indicators and your trading system have worked in the past market.
Now, back testing is done with historical data. What this means is that although your trading system might perform very well with back testing, it may not work in the present market. Market conditions keep on changing and what worked in the past may not work in the present. In the same way, what didn’t work in the past may start working now.
In other words, no two trades work out in exact the same way twice. SO you have to be careful when looking at the back testing results and take it with a pinch of salt. However, there are still some advantages of back testing a trading system.
Back testing can give you a feel how a particular market behaves under certain conditions. Back testing can also spot you certain general characteristics of the market like the seasonal trends and market tendencies.
For example, some markets especially the commodities market is highly seasonal and cyclical in nature. Now in other markets, you might not find any seasonal trends. For example, there is very little seasonality in curreny market or the bond market. In case of the stock market, there is much talk of the January Effect. Well, it is there no doubt about it. Some years, it is highly pronounced and others it is not that pronounced. Similarly stock prices tend to rise at the end of each month and the first few days of the new months. The reason for this is that many institutional investors tend to put the new funds to work at the end of the month and the beginning of the new month!
Back testing can also help you establish the amount of time a particular market tends to run in a certain direction. For example, in case of US Dollar Index, its trend lines tend to last for months to years.
Now when you back test your trading system and the set of indicators, you can check their accuracy. For example, if you using a trading system based on moving average crossovers, you can back test it using different combinations. Then monitor each combination under live conditions to see which works the best.
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