Importance of Comparing Automated Trading Strategies to Buy&HoldImportance of Comparing Automated Trading Strategies to Buy&Hold | 04/15/23
Recently, TradingView introduced a new backtesting feature that allows traders to compare their trading strategy to simple "buy and hold" strategies. This has proven to be very useful for our trading team and crypto community, especially when attempting to find the best settings for manual and automated trading scripts, such as our Ninja Signals V4 script, so we wanted to highlight this awesome new feature.
In this example, we used TradingView's new 'Compare to Buy & Hold' feature to compare our chosen configuration settings for our Ninja Signals V4 automated trading script and backtesting strategy. As you can see, our chosen settings have performed significnatly better than simple "buy and hold" strategies over the last several years (compare the green strategy profit line to the blue "buy and hold" profit line).
This new TradingView feature is very powerful, because it helps traders determine if a trading strategy is more or less profitable than simply buying and holding. Just because a trading strategy produces some profit does not mean that it is worth trading, especially if simple "buy and hold" strategies out-perform your chosen trading settings.
The settings used in this chart performed well even the recent bear market. As you can see in the strategy statistics, as "buy and hold" strategies were losing profit, the settings we used for our Ninja Signals V4 trading script were actually gaining profit. This new TradingView tool improves our ability to find good settings for both manual and automated trading strategies, and gives additional confirmation that profitable trading settings are better than simple "buy and hold" strategies.
Furthermore, the settings we used in this chart have compounding turned off, meaning each trade is the same order size, without any reinvesting of profits. Even as our trading fund grows from this profitable trading strategy, we continue to simply place orders for the same amount each time, rather than re-investing profits to trade larger and larger amounts (known as "compounding"). If compounding is turned on, profits grow much faster, but that is beyond the scope of this publication.
We will publish a separate educational idea in the future about the importance of comparing "compounding" vs "non-compounding" settings when backtesting, but for the purposes of this chart, we simply wanted to share that we were able to achieve significant profits, even in a bear market, and even with no compounding (no reinvesting of profits).
In conclusion, the new TradingView "Compare to Buy & Hold" backtesting feature gives traders a powerful new tool to find better settings for their chosen trading strategy, and additional confirmation and confidence that live trading will be successful. We thank the TradingView team for adding this powerful new feature!
