About Backtested Strategies

Most trading content is written to persuade. Backtested Strategies is built to verify.

Backtested Strategies publishes backtests using a standardized, institutional-grade methodology designed to be internally consistent and reproducible. The goal is not to produce the most flattering curve, it’s to produce results that hold up under scrutiny and reflect how a trading account behaves over time.

Every strategy page answers three practical research questions: how the strategy behaves, what it likely costs to run, and where it may fit, if anywhere, in a disciplined portfolio. To answer those questions, each entry defines the strategy as precisely as possible, states the assumptions that govern the test, runs a clean benchmark under the same conditions, and interprets the results in a fixed order: activity, risk, result.

That discipline exists for a reason. In trading, seemingly small details often change the outcome. Definitions, signal timing, execution timing, costs, cash treatment, benchmark construction, data conventions, and point-in-time data handling can materially change a backtest. Backtested Strategies surfaces those details, resolves ambiguity, and preserves a clear paper trail from methodology to results.

The standard is not just to test strategies, but to represent them faithfully. Strategy rules are specified as clearly as the source material allows. Ambiguities are addressed explicitly. Strategy-specific exceptions are stated rather than implied. Published results are governed by one centralized methodology so assumptions remain consistent across episodes, and changes are made openly rather than silently. The result is a research library designed for comparison, auditability, and long-term usefulness.

What you’ll find here

You’ll find strategy pages that state the rules clearly enough to audit, replicate, and evaluate independently.

A standardized episode structure makes different strategies easier to compare across styles, instruments, and market environments.

Each page states backtest settings explicitly, including signal timing, execution timing, instruments, costs, cash treatment, and other assumptions that materially affect results, including the trading frictions that casual backtests too often gloss over.

Benchmark discipline helps readers judge results in context rather than in isolation.

Scorecards surface participation, drawdowns, volatility, and trade behavior before performance narratives.

A centralized methodology shows readers what is standard, what is strategy-specific, what has been overridden, and which assumptions belong to the house methodology rather than the strategy itself.

You’ll also find tuning work and variant rule sets presented as experiments, not prescriptions.

Who the site is for

Backtested Strategies is for readers who already think in terms of rules, data, constraints, and implementation details. That includes systematic traders, quants, portfolio managers, and serious individual investors who want to understand how a strategy actually behaved, not just how it’s marketed.

The site serves readers who care about more than a headline return number. It’s for people who want to understand the full structure of a backtest: the rule set, the assumptions, the benchmark, the frictions, the accounting treatment, the risk path, the trading activity, and the market environments that shaped the outcome. It gives readers enough specificity to evaluate the work for themselves.

Across the site, the operating principle is straightforward: fewer claims, more evidence; less persuasion, more verification. The purpose of the research is to help readers judge whether a strategy is clearly defined, faithfully represented, rigorously tested under stated assumptions, and worth further study.

About the founder

Backtested Strategies was created by Brian Ernest Metzger, whose work reflects a simple view: the difference between what is merely interesting, and what is actually useful, is rigor.

In this field, details are not cosmetic. They change the outcome. That standard shapes the work behind Backtested Strategies: precise definitions, consistent terminology, explicit assumptions, careful treatment of edge cases, and rules readers can inspect and audit.

Brian is also the founder of Marquantex, a quantitative strategy research and advisory firm focused on disciplined strategy evaluation and due diligence.

Brian holds an MBA from Georgetown University and lives in the San Francisco Bay area.