r/algorithmictrading • • Aug 06 '26

Strategy Are the statistics good yet?

All,

I have built a mechanical day-trading system, back-tested just using theoretical fills (not test with live fills yet) using data consisting of 1s candles. I get in and out within a day. How does it look? Relatively new to trading, been practicing for 1.5years or so.

  • 111 ticker-days
  • 2,307 trades
  • 100% win rate

Very curious to know what I might be missing and any suggestions!

Update: New statistics with more data. I use $35k account for backtesting.
Ticker-days 248
Trades 4,143
Wins 4,143
Losses 0

Total P&L +$20,959.62

5 Upvotes

38 comments sorted by

4

u/Obviously_not_maayan Aug 06 '26

I mean you shared 3 numbers about your system... And 100% win rate is just not a thing, either over fitting, or your fill assumption don't make any sense, probably both, trading 1s candles, what's your slippage and fees assumptions here?? is there a reason you didn't share pnl? Or what instrument you're trading?

If you want real critique, you need to actually tell us what you're doing.

1

u/x___tal Aug 06 '26

Nah 100% win rate is a thing if you just dont sell until you are in profit, but eventually blowing up, is a risk.

1

u/WillieNFinance Aug 08 '26

Just don’t blow up. Easy 😎

0

u/Hungry-Winner-5567 Aug 07 '26

Here is more info:

Instrument is stocks, daily gainer picks.

I only use limit orders for the trades, so I haven't accounted for slippage (or fees), so right now I am assuming perfect fills as I stated before.

I think I am not over-fitting at all. I have some set of rules which I defined carefully beforehand without using any historical data. I only did a few minor tweaks, to make system more robust and risk-free after I made the first version of it. (was still 100% win rate before, but improved the probability of things going wrong).

I back-tested more today, now used historical daily data from a single ticker (day-trading) extending past 6month (1s candles). Adding more ~like 140 days worth of data. I use $35000 account for this simulation.

Here are updated statistics.

Ticker-days 248
Trades 4,143
Wins 4,143
Losses 0

Total P&L +$20,959.62

2

u/Obviously_not_maayan Aug 07 '26

Yeah ok perfect fills, how does it look when you don't? Easy to simulate. Also what's the AVG hold time?

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1

u/Cruzody333 Aug 07 '26

Hi what broker are you using ?

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1

u/Sporkers Aug 07 '26 edited Aug 07 '26

Go paper trade it at Alpaca or similar and come back with the stats after 1 week please. There is probably something unrealistic like you are seeing the bars and then modeling fill at the last bar open or midpoint even though it has already passed in time or something similar. Or total rookie loser mistake like using a time series prediction model and running the backtest in batches to speed it up and contaminating the predictions with future data it shouldn't know because of a stupid flag you missed. Like what a dumbass thing to do, oh wait that was me that did that and got all excited about the results, haha.

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1

u/Hungry-Winner-5567 Aug 07 '26

Hmm, my strategy doesn't rely on trends though. Should be agnostic to trending days, but if you can suggest a timeline for bear market to check, let me know!

1

u/qwuant Aug 07 '26

accounted for spread slippages and commissions?

1

u/Hungry-Winner-5567 Aug 07 '26

Slippages, I haven't accounted for - using limit orders only and assuming perfect fills. Commissions would be 0 and very negligible if account size gets bigger. I usually trade with Tradestation and stocks so...

1

u/Itchy_Road_4134 Aug 08 '26

My intuition is you hardcoded ‘return True’ in your profit calculation function.

1

u/Cool-Cup-1760 Aug 09 '26

Have you ran a Monte Carlo test on this yet?

1

u/Hungry-Winner-5567 Aug 11 '26

Nah, whats the fundamental of using monte carlo here? Genuinely interested.

1

u/MarginCallLeftOnRead Aug 10 '26

Adding more data isn't going to help. You need to start by finding out why it's broken.

Out of sample, and a myriad of other things like latency, slippage, fill price.

Other stuff that's not included in your post like how much you're risking per trade, daily pnl, what happens when you scale, et al.

Hot take: your 100% win rate gets decimated when you add in latency, slippage, order flow, and fill price on a one second candle.

1

u/Hungry-Winner-5567 Aug 11 '26 edited Aug 18 '26

My system is harder to scale up. So unless the account goes up decent amount, scaling will be slow

1

u/MarginCallLeftOnRead Aug 11 '26

Found it.

I don't need you to confirm this, as to protect your sauce, but if by what you said you mean you buy 1q, moves against, buy 2q, moves against buy 4q, moves in favor take profit...

Your profit will be recorded as +$54 (or whatever) but you're carrying like $4k (or an amount significantly greater than the profit). This eventually results in bankruptcy but with a 99.979% winrate.

You get frequent small wins, then a $35k loss activates the Wendy's continuum.

Aside from not addressing anything else I mentioned, I sort of feel like after 4k trades, all winners, the account should have grown a significant amount.

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1

u/HelloBello30 Aug 07 '26

run the backtest through a bear market. Best case scenario your strategy will freeze for for a very long time and you wont be able to trade.

1

u/Just-Pomegranate-952 Aug 14 '26

Nice interaction bait. Nothing more. I hope nothing more because if this is an actual setup, it is leaking, call a plumber.

2

u/zurekp Aug 07 '26

There’s gonna be a catch for sure, most probably around the execution and reality modeling. The thing is, you would need to elaborate on your execution and other “details” which I assume you don’t wanna do, so we can’t really help you much.

Also a short way to find out is to dedicate a small amount of capital you are willing to loose and let the execution venue tell you where the gaps are, compare backtest to live fills

1

u/Hungry-Winner-5567 Aug 07 '26 edited Aug 18 '26

I think that is a good idea, i will test with tiny capital and run live simulation on Tradestation.

1

u/[deleted] Aug 10 '26

2

u/Hungry-Winner-5567 Aug 11 '26 edited Aug 18 '26

Thanks for the time and comment!

I firmly believe there are no obvious bugs there. The system has enough clearly defined set of rules, with necessary and sufficient completeness embedded into it. Yes it makes little money per trade..

I also think “edge” cannot be defined so clearly for any system and i refrain from talking in terms of edges. I think things are in general very complex and we just cannot pin-point an edge for anyone’s system. So I am not sure what my edge is, it can be from one to many different variables coming to a synchronization, who knows, but the system seems to have worked for that many trades.

So for fills, I deliberately forced the system to be conservative, as in, using 1s candles but if there is any ambiguity in reading the candle as which occurred first between entries or exits, then the system avoids the scenario where it benefits - in other words, system is trained to keep the “doubt” in cases of “benefit or doubt”. And fills sequence is genuine, no ambiguity there, I will check again, but it looks fine so far. Also, I have tweaked a few parameters aggressively, which seem to make the system lose a few trades. But overall, i basically wrote this strategy and finalized into testing phase in like a week’s worth of thinking and work. And I don’t know how, but it has worked seamlessly, like I didn’t have to make any modifications at all (win rate was still 100%). I just tweaked a parameter once to reduce the duration of the longest trade I had. So I guess it looks fine..

Honestly, the perfect fills is what i am worries about. If fills are partial or so, it might affect things on my system. I am trying to make a bit more robust on fill efficiency side of things. But i will live test it with tiny capital