Hello everyone,
So I recently took a course about a month ago on how to optimize MT4 / MT5 bots and the author of the series always said to use 3 months backtest, 1 month forward test. Now to me, that didn’t seem like enough. But then I see others that claim that more than 2 or 3 years is needed for backtesting. But in my experience, everytime I do this, the best forward test had the absolute worst backtest results. The only way to really get an average profit is to use the parameters that just did average in both the backtest and forward test so that at least you can rest easy knowing that its at least half-optimized for past market conditions and half-optimized for future and get the best of both worlds. I think its impossible to optimize a robot to trade in an uptrend, downtrend, ranging, or volatile markets all at the same time.
Now I’m thinking, maybe the author was right. I should be optimizing bots for current market conditions only, and re-optimize every 3 months, instead of trying to find the “ultimate” parameters for the last 10 years because this never works. Especially when I see some bot authors posting pictures of robots that earned billions of dollars in 10 years
So maybe I’ll do 3 months of backtest and 3 months of forward test just to have a good picture of the current market.
What are your thoughts?