Quote from maninmoon:
Very Nice trading Tom,
You say "if you want to see the results over past data - just run the bot over it".
What I am trying to see is what the bot(or parameter set) you had at the START of the data period would have done. i.e. one that had not seen the data in the period.
I know you are an experienced professional Tom - so I am sure you can see what I am looking for - the unfitted results. Are you saying that NO market data from the past is included in the training(optimisation) process?
The strategy played has nothing to do with any period or optimization. I determine strategies based on (real time) random data. Then that strategies are applied to the real time data.
If you run the bot on past data you can use any strategy you like and see what it would have done.
My <b>strategy selection</b> process has really nothing to do with past data. It's only based on mechanisms which make intuitive sense (to me) and that are, then, tested and calibrated using realtime random data, to avoid the possibility of overfitting.
There is no overfitted results. If I showed you an "overfitted result", that is the best one on the set of permutation of all rules on a given dataset, it would be just unbelievably good. But that would mean nothing.
Probably you have not really got that what you see as simulation <b>is not 1 backtest</b>, but the <b>average performances over 1000 runs, complete with distributions of the most useful (for me) performance indicators</b> Check better the results: these histograms are just the <b>resampling distributions</b>. When you have time to read the past post of this thread everything will be even more clear.
And yes! No past market data is included in the optimization process. It's just <b>random data, totally unpredictable, created on the fly and traded on the fly, tick by tick, and different for each simulations</b>. If you run the sim on your machine you will get completely different prices at each run. But averagely, on a sufficiently large number replications, of you will see about the same results for a given strategy.
Tom