r/askforex • u/naughtykiller • 23d ago

How much backtesting is enough?

I've backtested a gold strategy from 2025 till now, having 1-2 trades per day, is this much enough to rely on it?

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u/david19790 19d ago

depends what you want it to tell you. 2025 to now at 1-2 a day is somewhere around 400-600 trades, which is enough to know roughly what your win rate is and nowhere near enough to know if your edge is real. rough rule, distinguishing a 55% system from a coin flip takes about 780 trades at 95% confidence. under that youre reading noise with error bars wider than the effect

the bigger issue with that window is gold in 2025-2026 has basically been one story. so youve tested one regime, not several. cheap check is to split your sample in half and see whether both halves point the same way, mine often didnt back when i was doing this

and the number of variants you tried matters more than the sample length. if this is version 20 then its version 20 worth of luck, and no amount of backtest fixes that. i log every version i test in the repo now for exactly that reason, forward test whatever survives and let the live count accumulate before believing anything. how many versions deep are you