Noon Barbari

Validation & overfitting

How can I tell if my strategy is overfit?

Five practical smells: (1) performance collapses when you split the data and test only on the held-out part; (2) tiny parameter changes cause big performance swings — a real edge is a plateau, not a spike; (3) the strategy has many conditions or 'magic' constants that exist to dodge specific historical losses; (4) it works on one coin and nowhere comparable; (5) you tested many variants and kept the best without correcting for the search.

The systematic versions of these checks are exactly what a robustness scorecard runs: out-of-sample splits, parameter-sensitivity sweeps, walk-forward segments and a deflated Sharpe. If a strategy passes all of them it can still fail live — but the failure odds drop enormously.

Robustness score (glossary)Test yours free

The fastest answer is a test

Most 'does X work?' questions take a minute to answer empirically — on real data, with an out-of-sample check, free.

Backtest a strategy free

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Educational content, not financial advice. Backtested and historical figures describe past periods only; past performance does not guarantee future results.