There is some truth to it.
I read nearly 80 books on trading,took one year off from work and studied price movements and indicators and put some money around 4K to trade to see what suggestions i will get from live trading after all I read.Also studied game theory,roulette results etc and i burned out.Long story short like a year later i sat down one Saturday in the park drinking coffee and started thinking about it again.I said to myself lets throw out all what i learned and start again,but this time only research further idea,concept that so far i never read about.Does not matter how crazy it is.
wtfauoa gives the hint you won't find it in a standard backtest.Why,because that part or logic as one would say will not come to the surface in the backtest.Needs to be on its own in order to see the value in it and what it really is.
So all these computer science guys writing code and testing have little chance to see it in results of backtesting.It will get skewed or covered up
Elitetrader is decent forum,between 2001 and 2006 i used to read it almost daily,some guys here wrote things that made me open my eyes.I think it is still good forum,but i don't search for knowledge like back then so i look at it differently.
BTW I lost that 4K,it was good tuition,needed to know what losing does and what emotions are.The obvious was that losing breaks the rational thinking so i needed to come up with fully mechanical system in order to deal with it