learning how to backtest investing strategies with excel

[jcbg]

I need to learn how to backtest investing strategies with excel.

Now, I am only a "low level" user of excel.

I will be very grateful if someone could recommend me any good book or website to start learning and deepening, to be able to do backtesting of investing strategies with excel.

Thanks a lot.

jcb

 

[venkat1926]

google search would have given some ideas
for elg.

Using Excel to Back Test Trading Strategies

 

[Andrew Fergus]

Hello and welcome to MrExcel.

Sorry to disappoint but I'd say Google is your friend. A quick search showed up two interesting pages:

Walking the talk: Applying back-tested investment strategies in practice
which seems to suggest back-testing to create an investment strategy is flawed given the cost of trading in the real world.

Sorry but I'm a sceptic when it comes to technical analysis so I'm probably the wrong guy to answer your question. I believe a lot of strategies are self-perpetuating, and I believe there is a massive assumption in that whatever happened in the past is likely to happen again in the future. In other words the belief is we can predict the future by examining the past, which I don't accept sorry.

But in the interest of balance here is another link:
Backtesting: Interpreting The Past
which seems to offer some tips when creating an investment strategy that you want to back-test.

Insofar as the modelling side of it goes, I recommend you start by gathering the data you want you base your strategy on. Don't underestimate the enormity of the dataset if you are going to track multiple investment products over a large time period. Where the data blows out is usually minute by minute data (or with smaller time slices).

Is this something you must develop? I imagine there may be free products available for download....?

Andrew