Recently when designing strategies, I encountered an issue where based on the strategy I designed, the trade volume during backtesting is very limited.
However, if I remove some indicators, it can indeed increase the number of trades, but may decrease profitability.
I often see other people sharing strategies with high trade volumes while still maintaining profitability.
How are they able to achieve this?
For example in the image below, this strategy was run for 5 years and only had 199 trades, which is too few. I’ve also provided the entry and exit logic.
I’m wondering if anyone has suggestions on how to improve the trade volume issue within the context of this trading logic.
I will explain using Buy orders.
First stage - When all conditions are met, it will be placed in pending orders:
- Previous candle’s close must be above 200MA on weekly chart
- 50MA on weekly chart must be above 200MA on weekly chart
- Daily MACD above or below 0-line and value greater than 0
Second stage - open order when conditions are met:
- Whether the last 3 candles form a V-shaped reversal pattern
I can answer from my perspective, you will do it what you want. I assume that you are to trade via one strategy I wrote a short post about it here The risk of trading one profitable strategy Low number of trades doesn’t mean that your strategy is bad for daily and weekly charts it is an ok number of trades. Don’t abuse strategy to trade more just because of low number of trades, instead of it, try to build more that kind strategies
I also have a strategy with similar number of trades, it is really stable and profitable during crisis time
What do you know about this people and their strategies?
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I do not see that at all. I see a large number of people telling me that for marketing purposes (and a small number of people telling me that because they wish to reinforce their own belief that it is so) but I do not believe it.
It is indeed very difficult to come up with a strategy that has high trade volume and good performance.
Recently I’ve tried some shared strategies on a live account, and found that it’s waiting to open orders every day, but so far none have been triggered.
This is probably because I’m too eager to validate the results.
Thank you all for the reminder, quality over quantity is important. I’ll continue researching price action strategies, because I believe this approach is more likely to generate higher trade volume.
However, after backtesting I found the MDD was not ideal, so I’m still working on improving it.
Trading is really interesting, and it’s even better if you can make money from it.
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You can’t compare strategies on daily time frame with strategies on H1 time frame, metals with currencies, types of strategies to each other. Each time frame, market and strategy type has the own characteristics. If you have trend following strategy, don’t expect high win ratio with thousands of trades.
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As ProfesorPips has pointed out, this equates to one trade per week, which from my perspective would actually be an ideal plan. I sometimes wait weeks (in some areas, years) for many of my plans to even get near the zone, let alone provide entry criteria that trigger a trade. What would you rather have? One plan that generates 10 trades per week, or 10 plans that provide a trade entry once per week. Given that my market participation is so low, I would far rather have the latter. Besides, my investment to trade ratio is theoretically 80% investment, 20% trade, and more in practice like 95 / 5, my time actually spent developing trading plans is severely down on previous years. However, I have made some rather large investment shifts this year that I have not done for over a decade, so trading by itself had become relatively far less important than investing. Looking in to next year (2024), I need to reassess trading a lot. My life plans have changed so much since my wife passed away Q1, 2023, it has been a very strange year for me. In some respects, I have yet to absorb the full impact of how this has changed my lifetime goals and objectives. They have become more short term than I had previously allowed for. 
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Thank you for your reply. I agree with what you said, but when developing a strategy, backtesting is still needed to validate its performance. Some articles and people have mentioned that if the number of trades in the backtest is too low, the reference value of the backtest results will be limited.
That’s why I wanted to generate more trades in the backtest to begin with. And it is true that as the number of trades increases, metrics like profit, win rate, and maximum drawdown tend to get worse.
If the goal is to validate a strategy but the number of trades is low, are these backtest results still worthwhile as a reference? Of course I know it can be verified through a demo account, but apart from that, are there any other methods?
I’m very sorry to hear about the passing of your wife. I hope you can move past the grief soon.
Thank you for your reply. I agree that investing requires time and patience, but I have set some goals for myself recently (maybe next year), to develop short, medium, and long-term strategies of different types. Of course, making profits is the main motivation, I don’t think anyone invests hoping to lose money.
In addition, I want to cultivate a second skillset and interest for myself, hoping to diversify my income sources and abilities.
That’s why I’m currently trying to experiment with different types of strategies. I hope ultimately I can develop a combined strategy, since having more strategies can reduce some risks.
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And finally we are reached to your problem 
yes, you should reach according number of trades in back test depends on strategy complicated, it is called degree of freedom. Basically, you should verify strategy on demo and compare your results in back test if both results match to each other, strategy is promising, if not you should not use this strategy on real market.
I’m very sorry, there is another issue that has confused me for a long time.
When I develop a strategy that performs well on EURUSD, but then performs poorly when applied to USDJPY, is this normal?
Would this be because the strategy is over-optimized?
In general, does a good strategy need to work well across all symbols?
I know methods which using test on different symbols and not use this test and I got positive results in both cases. Each markets, symbols and time frames has own characteristics so no, a good strategy doesn’t have to work on all symbols.
Thank you for your reply. I will study more.
