Stop Backtesting Your Intraday Strategies for Many Years.

This is one of the mistakes that most of the traders do; people should not try to test the strategy and the intraday strategy to check whether it has been working for e.g., 5-10 years because the markets keep changing. Volatility, liquidity, and the behavior of the participants keep changing. It is simply impossible and also unreasonable to expect a strategy to be able to survive all the different types of market regimes. When a trader forces his short-term trading strategy to survive a 5+ year backtest, then he throws away all those strategies that would have been good in the current market regime just because they had not survived in some other market regime from e.g., 8 years ago. This is not a reasonable process and it uses up a lot of potential. This is a more reasonable process where shorter durations can be used. A trader should use a recent period while designing the strategy. He should design the strategy using a recent period and then test it in the same period. Most of the trading strategies will not make it past this stage, but if your strategy happens to be profitable and makes it past the stress test, collect stress testing samples to check how your system reacts to abrupt market changes, such as reciprocal tariffs, January 2022, Covid 19. Should your strategy performance fall by more than 80% during an out of sample or stress test period, it is not good enough to continue to the next stage of forward testing or live trading. The approach is designed to verify whether you have an edge at present and not five years ago, when the market was very different. A small framework: 2 years or more with a sample of atleast 150 positions for the initial sample, to be clear a sample that spans atleast 2 years which contains a sample of atleast 150 trades is my first step. Examples:  Strategy 1: 2 years 360 trades Strategy 2: 2.5 years 150 trades Both outputs fit within the framework. After this:  Out of sample tests across other periods which display different market conditions followed by stress tests in adverse market conditions.  If the strategy collapses under these pressures, it belongs in the trash, if it survives then it can be considered for deployment.