Backtesting & verification

An MT5 backtest report is a claim about one set of trades on one price history, and both halves move the numbers. We read all 23 reports published here: 14 of the 20 that publish both slices flatter the period the EA was selected on, one report covers only 303 of its own 315 trades, and the same EA re-run on a different data source went from 1.35 and a pass to 1.13 and a fail.

We ran parameter searches on eight of our own strategy templates and adopted none of them. The useful part is how each one failed: the biggest in-sample winner fell the furthest, one design passed a single out-of-sample check and still collapsed, and two never beat 1.0 even on the period they were fitted to. Here is the procedure, and the reading that stops you shipping the top row.

Open the Strategy Tester, pick the data and settings that decide the answer, press Start, and read the report without fooling yourself. Includes one run quoted end to end, and the number nobody checks: across 23 published runs the equity drawdown was deeper than the balance drawdown every single time.