Questions tagged [backtesting]

The process of evaluating a strategy, theory, or model by applying it to historical data.

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What are the advantages of knowing the bid and ask over the best bid and ask?

I am importing historical intraday tick data from Bloomberg and I noticed the Bloomberg API allows users to import best bid, best ask, bid, and ask prices If I am backtesting a trading strategy, what ...
idealistikz's user avatar
5 votes
0 answers
785 views

VaR backtesting with overlapping time intervals

Of course the issue here is dependence: can it be removed or accounted for (in independence tests too, which of course would be troublesome)? There's a lot of literature on regression in this setting, ...
Quartz's user avatar
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Encyclopedia of Statistical Tests

I am aware of: Encyclopedia of Chart Patterns, Encyclopedia of Technical Analysis. Question I'm wondering if there's something similar, but in the form of: "Encyclopedia of Statistical Backtesting ...
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4 votes
1 answer
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Aftcast Generation

Aftcast is a way of simulating equity curves for different start years, usually from a large sample data ~100 years. Its kind of like start date sensitivity testing but in my case, I incorporated ...
user1234440's user avatar
2 votes
1 answer
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How far back is normal to backtest an ATS ? [duplicate]

Possible Duplicate: How much data is needed to validate a short-horizon trading strategy? How far back do people usually backtest trading systems? months? years?
Dez Udezue's user avatar
2 votes
0 answers
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Inferring Returns From Minimal Data Points [duplicate]

Possible Duplicate: How much data is needed to validate a short-horizon trading strategy? Suppose I have daily returns for a trading strategy against one month of data. Before starting trading on ...
Aziz's user avatar
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How do I backfill the price of bonds for backtesting?

I need to backfill the price of bonds for testing a startegy. The method employed is: Regressing the YTM of the bond against a benchmark. Using the regression estimates to calculate the YTM for the ...
user2591's user avatar
8 votes
4 answers
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How should I include the bid-ask spread as a transaction cost in a backtest?

I have two backtesting algorithms: One that uses bid and ask prices for signal generation. For example: Buy when $ask < threshold_1 $ and sell when $bid > threshold_2$. Bid and ask prices are ...
Victor's user avatar
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What latency should I use for backtesting a high-frequency strategy?

We're developing an HFT strategy for highly liquid futures traded at Eurex. We are planning to colocate our server and to use data feed of QuantHouse and execution API of ObjectTrading. Backtesting is ...
l.m's user avatar
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16 votes
3 answers
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How to account for transaction costs in a simulated market environment?

I am simulating a market for my trading system. I have no ask-bid prices in my dataset and use adjusted close for both buy and sell price. To account for this I plan to use a relative transaction cost....
Stian's user avatar
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7 votes
2 answers
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Cross Bid and Ask prices for Forex trading

I am using ITCH protocol to get the Market Data information for Forex and trying to implement LOB on it and what i have noticed is that Bid and Ask prices are crossing very often. Should that be ...
Taimoor Choudhary's user avatar
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Resequencing of MsgSeqNum in FIX 4.2

I am trying to achieve the following functionality using QuickFIX for FIX 4.2 Send a couple of orders and make sure they’re filled. Then disconnect. Change the incoming (from Broker) sequence number ...
Taimoor Choudhary's user avatar
10 votes
2 answers
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How to calculate the most realistic historical option prices with additional publicly available parameters

This is a follow up question of this one. My aim is to create the most realistic historical option prices possible with publicly available data. I want to do this for backtesting purposes. The ...
vonjd's user avatar
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5 votes
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Are there canonical test cases for testing of pricing engines

Short intro: We are developing pricing engines for the calculation of market risk in a Solvency II solution, including bonds, callable bonds, cds, options, futures and so on. Are there any canonical ...
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2 votes
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One bar look-ahead backtesting

Suppose you backtest the EUR/USD (or GBP/USD) forex pair with this system on the 1min timeframe: 1) Enter the market at any time n: go long if the "future" bar n+1 has a higher close as the close ...
Juergen's user avatar
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Any research paper on stop loss?

Has there been any rigorous study on stop loss ? When to apply it? Has it been shown to work through proper statistical backtests? I am interested in Equities, preferably European stocks.
Siddharth's user avatar
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What benchmark/index to use for backtesting a portfolio of stock options?

What benchmark should I use for backtesting a model for when I should buy an option of a particular stock? For equities, one could say their portfolio outperformed the S&P 500. I would like to ...
eWizardII's user avatar
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Which indices to use for an equity vs. fixed-income portfolio simulation?

I want to backtest several basic optimization methods (e.g. MVO, "most-diversified portfolio"), and I want to do this on a basket of different asset indexes. To start with, I want to simulate a 60/40 ...
Belmont's user avatar
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12 votes
4 answers
470 views

How to account for market movement when some exchanges are closed?

Daily data, such as open and close prices, is often available for much longer periods than high-frequency data. However, whenever backtesting any strategy that examines instruments traded in different ...
Tal Fishman's user avatar
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12 votes
1 answer
722 views

What tools and libraries may be used to model limit/stop systematic trading?

A lot of the tools/libraries out there seem to focus on close to close time series analysis. This is all fine but I typically do not trade close to close, I will use limit or stop orders that may or ...
dizzy's user avatar
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How to properly evaluate backtest returns?

Do you evaluate a strategy in a backtest based on the cumulative returns generated by the strategy (i.e. looking at the cumulative returns of the trades that occur) or do you start with a certain ...
silencer's user avatar
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9 votes
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How to vet an intraday strategy

I am working on an intraday strategy using 5/10 minute bars. I am getting a decent return and sharpe on the strategy. But on close examination I see that I am making about 1 cent per trade (I haven't ...
silencer's user avatar
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8 votes
3 answers
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How to compute the alpha decay of a strategy?

How can one compute the alpha decay of a systematic trading strategy?
Belmont's user avatar
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4 answers
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Evaluating automated trading strategies: accepted practice

Both for private projects, and for clients, I've been working on code a lot this year to evaluate automated trading strategies. This often ends up turning into the task of how to fairly compare apples ...
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19 votes
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How to build a regime-switching model which knows its own limits?

In recent months I've come to the conclusion that there are not only certain regimes in the markets (like bear or bull) but phases where all models fail because we are in uncharted territory. The ...
vonjd's user avatar
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11 votes
1 answer
610 views

What to ask for in a good prototyping framework?

Reading up on quantitative methods, model development, and back-testing, one obvious question springs to mind: What should one ask of a prototyping (model testing) framework? I know a lot of people ...
Martin Kristiansen's user avatar
8 votes
1 answer
901 views

Are shorter holding period strategies better?

Consider two statistically identical strategies (identical information ratios, sample size, ratio of transaction costs to total profit, etc.) except that one has a much shorter average holding period. ...
Tal Fishman's user avatar
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50 votes
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How much data is needed to validate a short-horizon trading strategy?

Suppose one has an idea for a short-horizon trading strategy, which we will define as having an average holding period of under 1 week and a required latency between signal calculation and execution ...
Tal Fishman's user avatar
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14 votes
3 answers
2k views

Literature on generating synthetic time series for testing

I have some market data (daily time series) for bond prices and CDS indices and I would like to generate synthetic versions of these which are statistically "similar" for testing trading strategies. ...
mathman's user avatar
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17 votes
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How to generate synthetic FX data for backtesting?

I want to generate synthetic forex data for the purpose of backtesting my trading algorithms. I have some rough ideas in mind on how to do this: Start with a curve representing a trend, then randomly ...
JeremyKun's user avatar
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How do I backtest a convertible bond arbitrage strategy in R/Matlab?

Since no one was able to answer my previous question, I am going to try to backtest a modern convertible bond arbitrage strategy myself (perhaps I'll report the results back here, if you're lucky :)). ...
Tal Fishman's user avatar
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17 votes
4 answers
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What is the ideal ratio of in-sample length to out-of-sample length?

Suppose you are running a portfolio of quantitative strategies and that you develop a new potential strategy to be added to the mix. Assume for simplicity that the new strategy is independent of the ...
Tal Fishman's user avatar
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9 votes
5 answers
2k views

What are the advantages of switching platforms/languages between strategy development and implementation?

I am interested in coding a medium frequency (trading over minutes to hours, holding for days to weeks) quantitative trading strategy and trading it with Interactive Brokers. I have seen many people ...
Tal Fishman's user avatar
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-2 votes
2 answers
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Market Data For Project

I'm looking to find a service that will allow me to download historical data on stocks, bonds, options, futures, indices, etc and also to pick up new files either on a daily or weekly basis. I've been ...
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13 votes
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What are the risk factors in analysing strategies?

What do you think of strategies displayed on timelyportfolio.blogspot.com? I really like the fact that there is some code to reproduce the strategies, but they seem very elementary because he does ...
nicolas's user avatar
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26 votes
3 answers
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Papers about backtesting option trading strategies

I am looking for all kinds of research concerning option trading strategies. With that I mean papers that publish results on different option trading strategies properly backtested with real-world ...
vonjd's user avatar
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16 votes
1 answer
588 views

Comparing backtesting returns with real trading returns

I have 10 years of backtested simulated performance of some trading strategy (using historical prices), and N months of actual trading performance. What statistical test can I do find out if I'm on ...
Nestor's user avatar
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15 votes
3 answers
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How to simulate slippage

I'm backtesting a trading strategy, using free OHLC data from yahoo or google. I'm simulating friction by lopping a flat percentage (say 0.5%) off my returns for each day that I make a trade. Whats ...
Zach's user avatar
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11 votes
3 answers
4k views

What is an effective way of backtesting VWAP execution?

From Optimal Trading Strategies : There are two main reasons why traders execute orders using a VWAP trading strategy. First, a VWAP strategy is the trading strategy that minimizes market ...
ali_bahoo's user avatar
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5 votes
1 answer
295 views

Multiple comparison problems

I recently read a blog entry where some statistics were generated for a common technical analysis indicator. Below is the link. My question shows up close to the bottom under the name bill_080, in ...
bill_080's user avatar
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15 votes
4 answers
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Trading C++ Libraries

Are there any free c++ libraries that would have some of the functions that would be used in developing a trading strategy. For instance, calculating drawdown, Volatility Forecasting, MAE, MFE....etc. ...
sharpeRatio's user avatar
28 votes
8 answers
5k views

How to design a custom equity backtester? [closed]

I was thinking about writing my own backtester and I realize I have to make some assumptions. So I was hoping I could post what I am planning on doing and hopefully some of you can give me some ideas ...
user667's user avatar
  • 381
12 votes
5 answers
2k views

How to conduct Monte Carlo simulations to test validity of Black Scholes for a specific option?

In reference to the original Black Scholes model, what approach is best to test the model in a rigorous way? Is there a standard approach that can accomplish this in a reasonable amount of time? ...
user avatar
7 votes
1 answer
221 views

Data on US bankruptcy rate vs. standard valuation ratios

Does anyone know of any research or data on US corporate bankruptcy rates as a function of standard valuation ratios, such as P/B, P/E, etc.? I'm trying to adjust the results of backtests to account ...
joshayers's user avatar
  • 618
12 votes
4 answers
460 views

Seeking Historical Non-Finance Datapoints for Backtesting

I'm working on some financial analysis code which I'd like to test against a historical dataseries to analyze the correlations to my algorithm to some non-finance related data. Ideally, I'd like to ...
Dave's user avatar
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26 votes
3 answers
5k views

Main backtesting & trading solutions: QuantFactory, Deltix, etc.

What are the most used/mature/promising commercial solutions today which handle backtesting/ automated trading needs? I'm talking about vertical product suites like QuantFactory or Deltix which ...
Romain Verdier's user avatar
7 votes
2 answers
422 views

Is there something like opportunistic "superstitious" trading?

This sentence in the following paper got me thinking: "Some traders [...] trade every pattern whether proven or not, expecting authentic ones to produce positive results, whilst the profits and ...
vonjd's user avatar
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8 votes
1 answer
762 views

What are the ensemble techniques to forecast returns?

It was pointed in an other question that ensemble methods can help to reduce curve fitting. What are your experience with these and which one seems the most appropriate? If I had two forecasters that ...
Zarbouzou's user avatar
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47 votes
5 answers
4k views

What are the key risks to the quantitative strategy development process?

Prompted in part by this question on data snooping, I would be interested to know: What are the key risks that should be considered when developing a quantitative strategy based on: (a) historical ...
Shane's user avatar
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36 votes
6 answers
6k views

What are the popular methodologies to minimize data snooping?

Are there common procedures prior or posterior backtesting to ensure that a quantitative trading strategy has real predictive power and is not just one of the thing that has worked in the past by pure ...
Zarbouzou's user avatar
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