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Posted November 6, 2026 at 11:12 am
The reason AI has such trouble creating trading strategies is the same reason traders do:
They create their very first strategy with the final version in mind.
That skips so many important steps in creating a strategy that actually works.
Imagine you’re standing at the bottom of a mountain and can see the summit.
A beginner points at it and says, “That’s where we’re going,” and starts walking directly toward it.
An experienced hiker looks for the trail.
Sometimes that trail goes sideways. Sometimes it even takes you downhill for a while.
The shortest-looking path to the destination is rarely the best way to get there.
Trading strategies work the same way. Your first backtest shouldn’t try to be the finished strategy. It should help you figure out where to go next.
This is the fundamental mistake most traders make when they try to backtest.
Your first backtest should be a starting point.
A good first backtest gives you a blueprint for which subset of trades you should take and which ones you should skip.
But only if you know what to do with it.
In my upcoming webinar From Idea to Backtest: Build a Trading Strategy with Claude on November 16, 2026, at 12:00 p.m. ET, I’ll share the exact process you can use to turn a loose idea into a tight strategy that works.
You’ll learn:
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