Good luck, but settle down and don't overthink things that don't matter brother. That's all I have to offer
Getting some skin in the game, not too much, is good for experience. But for forward testing, have you tried simulation? There is a tendency to think, the longer and harder pursuit, leads to results and "now I should be ready". Not so in trading. If leaning on the analysis paralysis-side, it's good not to incur psychological damage due to meeting reality of this business.
Thanks. I know I tend to make things more complicated than they have to be. But when I try simple ideas, they don't usually work out well for me.
I do forward test by keeping a record of what these strategies predict after their daily runs using the same amount of historical data for each run. Using some real money for trades but not so much that large losses would affect my standard of living makes me take the trades more seriously.
And I understand that spending a lot of effort doesn't mean anything useful will come out of it. For example, I spent a lot of time (months) trying various combinations of John Ehlers-style cyclic indicators from his books (mostly porting EasyLanguage code to perl). But these indicators never worked consistently for me.

. [Note to self: don't make any financial transaction when you are talking on the phone to your father who is both hard of hearing and has some dementia
.] I tried to make up for this mistake by selling some shares early and not buying at other times during this period.