BACKEST TO BROKE

It's 2:47 AM. Your equity curve is a beautiful 45-degree line. Your win rate is 68%. Your hands are trembling with certainty. That feeling is a lie. And unless you understand exactly why, that backtest is going to bankrupt you. Backtest to Broke is not a book about finding a winning strategy. It's a forensic investigation into why the best-looking backtests routinely produce the worst live results - and a complete professional framework for building systems that survive contact with real markets.
Across 24 chapters, three parts, and a practitioner's toolkit built for immediate use, N. S. Hope dismantles the illusions that quietly bankrupt retail algorithmic traders: survivorship bias, look-ahead bias, overfitting, the hidden tax of transaction costs, the false comfort of a flawless Sharpe ratio. Then he rebuilds the discipline from the ground up - walk-forward analysis, Monte Carlo stress-testing, kill criteria, capital scaling rules, and the emergency playbook for when everything breaks anyway.
Inside, you'll learn:?        Why a "perfect" backtest is often the clearest warning sign of a broken strategy?        How look-ahead bias, survivorship bias, and overfitting quietly fabricate edges that were never real?        Why "zero commission" is a marketing claim, not a cost structure - and what it actually costs you?        A step-by-step professional backtesting workflow, from raw data to walk-forward validation to Monte Carlo stress-testing?        The 10-step pre-flight audit, the kill criteria checklist, and the emergency protocols professionals use to survive what backtests never showed them?        How to shift from profit-seeking gambler to risk-managing detective - the identity change that actually protects capital This is not an instruction manual promising a Holy Grail strategy.
It is, in the author's own words, a psychological and epistemological intervention - a confrontation with reality for traders who are ready to stop mistaking luck for skill. Written for traders with real experience - familiarity with basic technical indicators, backtesting software, and position sizing - who are ready to trade like engineers instead of gamblers. If you're looking for secret indicator settings, this isn't it.
If you're ready to find out what's actually hiding in your equity curve, turn the page.