How to Backtest a Trading Strategy on Tradingview - YouTube

Have you ever thought to yourself, I wish I could instantly test my strategy with out

waiting months or even years, to see if my trading strategy is even good or not.

Well, what if I told you there s a way to test any trading strategy you want on years

of data from the past, instantly. To see right then and there if your trading strategy is

profitable or not. Instead of just believing a YouTuber that

says they have a 100% win rate strategy, why not test it for yourself to see if it really

is that good or not, and see how it compares to your strategy that you re currently using.

In this video, I m going to show you exactly how to do that. By backtesting your strategy

on TradingView with past years of data. So you can see just how successful your trading

strategy really is. Let s get straight to it.

First things first, we have to go to TradingView. I ll have a link in the description. And as

a side note, this is completely free to use and you don t need a paid subscription or

anything. Which is pretty awesome. Once your on tradingview, go to chart option

on the top here. Then type in any security you want to test

your strategy on. This will work with anything. Stocks, forex, crypto, whatever.

For this example, I m going to test the Vanguard S&P 500.

Now for this video we are going to test a very simple trading strategy. Just so you

guys can kind of get a grasp on the basics of backtesting. If this video gets a good

response and you guys really want to see more of this, I ll do a 2nd video where I ll get

a little more advanced. The trading strategy example we will do, is

just a simple moving average strategy. It s pretty simple. We have a 20 day moving

average and a 50 day moving average. We want to buy, when the 50 day crosses below the

20 day, and we want to sell, when the 50 day crosses above the 20 day.

Like I said, very basic and simple trading strategy, but this is just to show you the

basics of backtesting. I should also mention. That Tradingview has

a page where it has a bunch of pre bult in variables functions, so you don t have to

custom make all of them. We are going to be using a lot of them in this video. So I ll

leave that in the description as well if you want to check that out.

So once you type in whatever security you want to test. You are going to go down and

click on this bottom tab that says pine editor .

The very first line, is what you want to name your trading strategy. So, we are going to

name this simple moving average strategy . Next, we are going to set our variables. The

first one we ll call ema20 for our 20 day moving average and the second one we ll call

ema50 for our 50 day average. Next we are going to use the built in ema

function from the tradingview page I was talking about before. So we just type ema( . Now this

function takes two parameters. The first parameter is if you want the ema to read from the open

or close of a candle as a reference point. With moving averages, I think its best to

read from the close. So we ll do that for this strategy.

Then the 2nd value is the time frame. So for a 20 moving average we are going to set it

to 20. Then you re going to do the exact same thing

for this one, but make it 50. Next we are going to set our long and short

conditions. So we want to go long, if ema20 is above the

ema50. Then we want to go short if the ema 20 is below ema50.

So keep in mind, these aren t entry points, but they are just simply telling the bot what

we define as a long and what we think is a short.

To do entry points we are going to use another built in function, which is strategy.entry

. The first parameter is the name, so we ll

call this entry long, then the 2nd parameter is what we actually want to do, so we type

in strategy.long , the 3rd parameter is how many shares you want to purchase, so in this

example we will just do 1000 shares. Then the 4th parameter is when we want to

actually execute the trade, so we type when = long . Which is saying we want to execute

a long trade when these parameters above are met.

So we have the name, whether we want to go long or short, the amount of shares, and when

want to execute. Then we are going to do the same thin g for

a short trade. So name this short , strategy we want is short, still have it as 1000 shares,

then we want it to execute it when this short condition is true.

Right now we have it setup to where its longing and shorting. But it s not actually closing

positions at this time. It s just constantly opening trades.

So lets setup to where it actually closes them.

To do that, just simply use strategy.close . Then we are going to give it a few values

to tell the bot when we want to close a position. So we want to reference what position we want

to close, so we want to close a long trade, when short is true. Then we will do the opposite

for a short. So close out a short position when long is

true. So just all this code alone, in theory, will

buy every time when the 50 day crosses below the 20 day, and will sell, when the 50 day

crosses above the 20 day. It will also do the opposite with short trades.

Let s run it to see if it works. To do that, go to this tab up here add to

chart and that will start our backtest. So it looks like it worked. The cool thing

about tradingview, is that it will actually display on the chart where it bought and sold.

This way you can check to see if the bot is running correctly and buying and selling where

you actually want it to. You also have these 3 different tabs.

The overview tab will show you an equity curve, your net profit, amount of trades, max drawdown,

avg trade, etc. The

performance summary basically gives the same information, but in a table format.

Then theres the list of trades tab, where it will show you every single trade and when

and how it was executed. So you can see here, that we went all the way back to the 1970s.

So maybe you don t want to test all the way back to 1970? Well you can actually edit the

script to where you can tell the bot a specific amount of time you want to test.

To do that, just go to this line right here and create a start and end variable. Then

we are going to use the prebuilt timestamp function So we are going to set our start,

lets say 2019, august, 1, then hours, and minutes.

Then we ll just copy and paste this and set our end point to 2020.

So this will test our strategy from august 2019 to august 2020 on the s&p 500.

Then we have to make an if statement. So if time is greater than or equal to our start

variable and if time is less than or equal to our end variable. We will run this code

below. Then, you just indent this.

Go to the add to chart button, and boom, you see that it tested trades from only 2019 to

2020. Now maybe you want to see your actually indicators

from the bot on the chart. Well, theres actually a way to do that.

Theres a prebuilt function called the plot function . So you just do plot( then whatever

indicator you want, the name, the color, then the width.

Then boom, it shows you the moving averages on the chart. Which is pretty cool.

B ut maybe you want it actually overlayed on the chart as you normally would have it

when you add indicators. To do that just go up here and set overlay

to true. Then botta bing botta boom, you have the indicator

overlayed on the chart. Like I said guys, this is a very basic strategy

and example, but I just wanted to show you the very basic opportunities you have with

backtesting. If you want to see a more advanced tutorial

on how to back test some advanced strategies, like this video and let me know in the comments

if you want that, and I ll make a more advanced tutorial.

Because there s some pretty crazy things you can to with this tradingview backtesing.

Now that you know how to backtest, you should backtest one of my strategies. Like this one,

where I show you one of my secret strategies that has a high pretty high success rate.

Thanks for watching and I ll see you guys next time.