Automation

Reading the TradingView Strategy Backtest Report: Spotting Overfitting

Between "I feel this makes money" and "the data says it made money over five years" sits one honest backtest. Swap indicator() for strategy(), add entry/exit orders, and the tester at the bottom auto-generates a report.

Read these four numbers first

1. Max drawdown: look at it before net profit — it decides whether you can hold the system long enough to reach profit;
2. Payoff × win rate: only the product is the expectancy; either alone will fool you;
3. Number of trades: under 100 has essentially no statistical meaning;
4. Commission and slippage: fill them honestly; omitting them on an intraday strategy is self-deception.

Three signs of overfitting

• Nudge a parameter and performance changes a lot — you optimized noise;
• It only shines on one instrument / one period — switch both to check;
• More and more rules, each to "fix" a few specific losses — that's memorizing the data.