DISCLAIMER: Any losses incurred based on the content of this post are the responsibility of the trader, not me. I, the author, neither take responsibility for the conduct of others nor offer any guarantees. None of this should be considered as financial advice; the content of this article is only for educational/entertainment purposes.
Introduction
Having figured out how to perform walk-forward analysis in Python with backtrader, I want to have a look at evaluating a strategy’s performance. So far, I have cared about only one metric: the final value of the account at the end of a backtest relative. This should not be the only metric considered. Most people care not only about how much money was made but how much risk was taken on. People are risk-averse; one of finance’s leading principles is that higher risk should be compensated by higher returns. Thus many metrics exist that adjust returns for how much risk was taken on. Perhaps when optimizing only with respect to the final return of the strategy we end up choosing highly volatile strategies that lead to huge losses in out-of-sample data. Adjusting for risk may lead to better strategies being chosen.
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