A lot of the comments here seem to be from people with institutional experience or wannabe retail traders. As a retail trader (who used to phone my broker to ma

A lot of the comments here seem to be from people with institutional experience or wannabe retail traders. As a retail trader (who used to phone my broker to make trades) that has progressed to an algorithmic retail trader (I do all my own development with some mentoring help from professionals) I can say that it is possible to make a good return on risk. This did not happen overnight. I've spent thousands on my education and by that I mean I've been scammed, gone to useless seminars, read nearly 100 books on the subject and made terrible trading errors and trading losses. I only started getting serious traction after a confluence of events that led to being tutored by an ex-JP Morgan quant and a software developer friend who has been developing trading software for the big Bank trading desks in London. Moral of the story? Persistence. How does this relate to the article? Persistance eventually overcomes a lack of testing to eventually lead to a robust testing methodology. So yeah I do agree that most (retail) trading strategies are not tested rigorously but that's due to the difficulties around acquisition of inter-disciplinary knowledge and the balls to get real experience my putting money on the line.