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Comment by throwaway77384 | Hacker News Reader

I understand that back-testing is a foolish way to work out whether a bot works, but it'd be interesting to see how this performs on arbitrary lengths of past history. Like, is this enough to beat a lazy index fund calculated over the same time, with interest reinvested?

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Why is backtesting foolish? As long as you haven't used the data you're using to backtest in any way, it seems like a reasonable way to test your strategy.

I think I was mainly trying to avoid risking that anyone reads this and thinks past performance is an indication of future performance.

Your point is perfectly valid and is a useful addition to my prior post.

I think it really depends on your experiment, the size of the trades you're making, and the restrictions you place on your backtest.

Otherwise, they could be an indication of future performance.

yeah lol why would induction be true

I think because the data you are backtesting doesn't react to the trades you make.

Unless you have order book data, then you can simulate market impact of your trades as well.

Depends on your scenario, but in a general sense, no, the extra degree of confidence from having that extra info is limited.

Just being visible in the OB will cause other people to act differently from if you weren't. This of course has a profound effect on strategies relying on passive orders.

Or course you're right, there is a lot of nuance into that. Btw, would you care to review historical tick crypto data API (https://tardis.dev) I've built? Seen your 'about' hence question.

At first glance looks useful. But data quality is really hard to judge without a deep dive.

That does sound like a fun experiment.

I will give a shout to these guys if anyone is interested in back testing -> https://www.coinapi.io/

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