Cesare - BacktestMarket

Trading - A proxy of life

When doing something you will have to face
those who wanted to do the same,
those who wanted to do the opposite and
the majority of those who did not want to do anything

The Beginning

It was a warm spring day when Me and Andrea, my future colleague, met for a beer. Talking about life, we found out a common passion for financial markets.

It is hard to say that we were passioned of trading, because we have had just a couple of experiences with it, mine with some Cfd's, earning 200€ within 3 months and his one a little bit bitter, losing all the capital he had invested by trading forex options.

There was a strong mutual will to better understand markets. Andrea was moved to the need to get into a deeper analysis of financial markets not to be defeated anymore and I was convinced, and still believe it, that man is born for trading. Since homo sapiens populate earth, trading had been the only way he knew to fulfill all his needs. Trading is a way to make money, we all would like to raise our capital, but me and Andrea believe is a challenge, a way to understand the behaviour of the entire world. It is stunning when we find out some evidence and markets confirm our hipotesis. It means we are part of a whole, we are part of what Hegel called Zeitgeist, we are part of the human history.

Challenge was and is nowadays what drives people to improve. We have been working a lot to build a set of instruments like high performing Expert Advisors and Indicators to start trading.

The Skills

I had some statistical and programming skills, while Andrea knew the markets and he tried the hard way how they can hurt you if not prepared. So from the middle of March 2015, the day we met for a beer at the local pub, do not remember the exact day, maybe because of the beers, until now September 1st 2017 we have been working on both sides of our system implementation starting from scratches.

On the one side I have been learning how to code Expert Advisors (by now EA), algorithmic trading systems able to operate on their own and how to set up a virtual machine online in order to run our EA 24h 7d. In the meanwhile Andrea started reading Larry Williams books and trying to backtest such strategies using excel. It was a mess! The thing I am sure to have cought is that Excel is not good for backtesting, expecially when you have to work with a huge amount of data. We overcame even that matter, by learning how to backtest directly in MT4.

The following trouble for us, was finding some good data for stronger evidences after backtesting. As you probably know, backtesting is useless if you do not have atleast 6 or 7 years of data, but it would be better having atleast 9 or 10 years of data for robust analysis. So we finally decided to buy them and we spent lots of money that we decided to implement a system for collecting data on our own, giving access to up to date data to many traders.

Backtestmarket.com is our tribute to the Zeigeist. We will never take back the money we spent probably, also because we sustain daily costs for keeping data up to date that are not fully covered by the prices of the data we sell, but as I said before, what is important for us is trading as a challenge and, maybe an almost selfless gesture is the key to understand human nature and thus financial markets.

The Growth

After many trials and time spent behind the scenes, we came out with a wonderful trading system that is performing so well and managing risk in a really good way. We did not stop here! We added many historical data and finally produced a new financial forecasting tool able to statistically suggest the direction of the market.

Cesare