So, over the last two years I dove deep into the world of backtesting for trading strategies—like, full-on coded my own tools for it on TradingView. If you're not familiar, backtesting is when you take a trading strategy, run it against historical data, and see how it would have performed. Sounds simple, but trust me, the insights it gives you can be a major eye-opener.

I built my tools on TradingView, mainly because a frind of mine wanted me to code one for him for his specific strategy. So I thought why not give it a go and see how other strategies peform. And it's also easy to share these tools on TradingView, so we both tried to test as many of the strategies everyone was praising on YouTube, etc.. So everytime I finished coding a script I gave my friend access to it and we both started backtesting for hours and hours and were sharing our results looking for the holy grail. It was pretty straightforward at first: open a chart on TradingView with enough backtesting data, add the script to the chart, press start, wait a few minutes, and then track profits, losses, drawdowns, etc. We added these results to an excel-file which became big as hell and soon gave me headached each time I opened that file. But once I started testing all these different strategies, the reality hit me—most of them failed to stay consistently profitable in the long run.

We're talking about strategies that look amazing over a couple of months or even a year. But zoom out to a longer time horizon, and suddenly they're losing more than they're winning. Volatility is a killer, and markets can be ruthless.

All these YouTube videos about strategies being tested 100 or even 1,000 times are all full of shit. I hate to break it to you, but strategies might give you 250% profits in one year, and the next year the same strategy will wipe out your whole account and take your wife away with it.

The crazy thing is, unless you hit a sweet spot, most strategies won't beat the market. The sweet spot I noticed? Roughly 20-30% annual returns. That’s the golden range where you’re making serious gains but not taking excessive risks that lead to a wipeout during rough patches. The only strategies that I found that make consistent gains were in that annual profit range after commissions, spreads and all other fees. Too many traders get sucked into chasing 100% gains in a year, but that kind of strategy often burns out, leaving you with massive drawdowns or complete whipeouts when things inevitably go south.

So what did I take away from all this? The big lesson: consistency beats flashy gains. A solid strategy that delivers 20-30% a year can compound into a fortune over time. Meanwhile, the strategies promising crazy returns are often a one-way ticket to big losses. I know what you're thinking: 20-30% gains a year are shit and you are completely right, but that's what I have found out when backtesting strategies based on technical analysis. I cannot speak for other strategies. But with the options we have nowadays (for example prop firms) 20-30% might still be enough to give you significant gains to live from.

At the end of the day, the backtesting tools taught me that it’s not just about finding a strategy that “works”—it’s about finding one that’s sustainable. There is no holy grail.