AI Backtesting Mistakes: Why You Should Try to Kill Your Strategy First
Let's be honest. The moment your backtest turns green, you start tweaking it. A slightly tighter stop here, a different RSI period there, maybe a time filter to cut out the losers.
That instinct isn't laziness. It's human. It's also how traders talk themselves into edges that were never real.
We get why this happens. AI makes optimizing dangerously easy. Ask Claude to test a thousand parameter combinations on your NQ strategy and it'll hand you results in minutes, not weeks.
The problem isn't the speed. The problem is what optimizing does to your judgment the second something "works."
Why Does AI Make Overfitting So Easy?
Here's the trap. With enough parameters and enough combinations, random noise starts to look like an edge. Test 700 variations of anything and a handful will look incredible, purely by chance.
That's not an edge. That's math doing what math does when you give it enough tries.
We ran into this ourselves. In one sweep across our futures strategy research on NQ, E...