Why 30 trades prove nothingIntermediate

How luck hides in small samples and how many trades you actually need.

Luck is loud in small numbers

Flip a fair coin 20 times and you will often see 13 or more heads. A strategy with no edge at all can show a 65% win rate over 20 trades just by chance.

A rough guide

Under 30 trades: an anecdote. 30 to 100: a hint. 100 to 300: worth taking seriously. Over 300, across several years and markets: real evidence. Daily strategies need many years of data to reach these numbers; intraday ones get there faster.

Check the spread of results

Look at the year-by-year table. An edge that appears in every year is far more believable than one that comes from a single great year.

Try it on your own strategy

Write your rules in plain words and test them on real data in seconds.

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More lessons

Why most strategies need a human behind the screenWhat a backtest can and cannot tell you about discretionary trading, and how to use both.Trading sessions and killzones: times, what happens in each, and how to test themAsian, London and New York sessions and the ICT killzones, with exact times in New York and London time, daylight saving notes and test rules.What a backtest is, and what it is notThe basics in five minutes: rules, data, costs and the limits of testing the past.How costs quietly eat small edgesSpread, commission and slippage explained, and why tight stops make them worse.When a great result is just luck: overfittingHow to tell a real edge from a curve-fitted one.R, risk per trade and drawdown in plain wordsHow position size, R-multiples and drawdown fit together.How to read your WickCheck resultsWhat each number means and the order to look at them in.

Education only, not financial advice. Definitions vary between teachers; these are ours, written for clarity.