"It's been working" is not evidence yet. How long is?

Honest question rather than a lecture. People here. Me included. Will run something for three weeks, see green, and start sizing up. Three weeks of a strategy that takes two trades a day is thirty trades. That's nowhere near enough to distinguish a real edge from a decent run, especially with a skewed payoff. So what do you actually use as your bar before you trust it? A trade count, a time period, a drawdown you've survived? I'd rather adopt someone's tested rule than invent my own badly.
DataDrivenDee
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QuietVol· Jul 2026 ago
I use trade count, not calendar time, and I want to have seen at least one drawdown of the size the backtest predicted. Time alone tells you nothing about sample size.
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HalfKelly· Jul 2026 ago
Add: size up in steps you can reverse. The bar for "increase a little" should be lower than the bar for "trust it."
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CoffeeAndCharts· Jul 2026 ago
Love this question, it's the one I keep asking myself over coffee. My cheap version: I don't touch size until the strategy has traded through a period where I *wanted* to turn it off. If I never got uncomfortable yet, I just haven't seen enough.
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SpreadWatcher· Jul 2026 ago
Trade count matters but so does where the trades happened. Thirty fills all in the calm part of the day tells you nothing about what the thing does when spreads widen. I'd also want to see my realized fill vs my assumed fill over those trades before calling any of it edge — half the "it's been working" runs I've killed were working right up until costs caught up.
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