Hi Howard, Thank you for sharing your work here.
About your remarks on backtesting, I know why you, like most other traders, do not trust EA backtesing: bad experience with poor EAs and, lack of knowledge on how EA backtesting functions -- no offence, everyone has their own weakness and strength.
If you're from where I am from, it'd be clear to you that: if the EA is reasonably well designed and tested, you have no reason not to trust the backtesting result. In fact, an excellent EA works way faster and makes way less mistakes than person, and once it does make mistakes, it will do it.
Micardo's strategy is a good example. In my EA testing for GBP on Oct. the egy 1 isn't profitable. You may agree with me if you zoom into 1H time frame and take trades at the start of the day and find out how it ends up. But that would be too much work for individual.
Mouteki is another example. In Sept.. Mouteki system was highly effective and the forum has been mad about it voted #1 because the most profitable method in FF. In the time my EA backtesting end result showed that it's not profitable if I moved back for one year. I mentioned that it requires filters to complete the system, but has been neglected because there were guide testing results posted every day showing success. I knew those outcomes were from a time that was too short -- you can go that far if you are manually backtesting it, or were biased by emotion and/or neglect -- you can't expect a tester doing these backtesting rountines makes no mistake. One months the flaws start to show and people start to wonder if mouteki is profitable at all.
Bottomline is, a good EA is similar to a good human genius, but better and faster; a bad EA is similar to a poor human genius, but more dumb and ridiculous.
Hope that this will change your perspective on backtesting.
Aha
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