Walk-Forward Testing & Out-of-Sample Discipline
The gold-standard way to test a strategy without fooling yourself: never let it see the data you judge it on. Translated for the retail trader.
Once you accept that a strategy tuned on a chunk of history will always look good on that same chunk, an obvious question follows: how do you ever test it fairly? The answer the professionals settled on is a discipline called out-of-sample testing, and its most practical form is walk-forward analysis. The core idea is simple enough to state in one sentence: never judge a strategy on the same data you used to build it. Everything else is detail.
The sin of marking your own homework
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