I trade manually. Though my entries are based off rules that are clear to me.
For all of my trading "ideas", I manually recorded every occurrence of the "signal" in multiple timeframes over the prior 250 trading sessions. If the idea was not looking profitable in that period, it was dropped. If it was profitable, with similar results across multiple timeframes, I'd double down and look through multiple timeframes in another 250+ sessions (in different market conditions), to see if results still held true. If they did, I'd start live trading the idea, continuing to keep tabs on the results.
For each sig occurrence, I recorded:
-stop size (based on signal bar)
-how much price moved in my favor before it reversed back to stop (or to next sig level).
-several concurrent things that could potentially be used as filters to negate the trade (e.g. what's happening in other time frames, what are the MAs doing, which entry #)
With this data, I determined how many trades would have won/lost when applying various reward:risk scenarios (1:1, 1.5:1, 2:1) and filters to all sigs.
Note, testing ideas felt extremely demanding on my time and focus. Also, ideas didn't come until 1000s of hours from my initial starting point.
EDIT add: This isn't a recommendation.. just process I came up which satisfies my comfort level to put on a trade.
