u/sqzr2

When you're refining a strategy, where do your hypotheses for filters actually come from?

Visual: you scroll through losing and winning trades on the chart, overlay indicators and notice things like "most losers happen when price is squeezed into a tight range" or "winners usually come after a big impulse candle". Then you turn that into a filter and test it.

Statistical: you dump trade data (indicator values, time of day, volatility, distance from MA, etc.) and look at distributions, correlations or feature importance to see what separates winners from losers. The chart barely comes into it.

I'm asking because I'm not sure where my time is best spent during refinement:

• Chart reading gives me ideas that make intuitive sense, but it's slow and I worry about confirmation bias and small samples
• Stats are fast and objective, but they only test the features I thought to include, and it's easy to data-mine a filter that falls apart out of sample

So:

1. Where do most of your filter ideas come from?
2. In refinement, do you spend more time on charts or on numbers?
3. Has one source given you filters that held up better out of sample?

For context, I build MT5 EAs and validate with in-sample/out-of-sample splits.

I'm curious whether my development process is fundamentally sound, or whether I'm wasting time.

My approach is to start with the raw idea only. I code the strategy with almost no optimisation or filtering. Just the entry/exit logic (signal + trigger). No time-of-day filter, no day-of-week filter, no volatility filter, no trend filter, etc.

I then run a backtest over 2022-2026. At this stage I expect the results to be bad. A typical first pass might be:

• Profit Factor: 0.75-1.0
• Sharpe: poor
• Max drawdown: ~15%

The idea is to analyse the trades, gradually remove weaker setups, and hopefully end up with something around a 1.25 Profit Factor before moving to forward testing.

The reason I'm asking is that I often see people here saying a strategy isn't worth pursuing unless the very first, unfiltered backtest already has a Profit Factor of 1.5+.

That seems almost impossible to me. If I could repeatedly create raw strategies with a 1.5 PF, it would feel like winning the lottery.

So am I approaching this correctly? Is it normal to start with a mediocre or even losing strategy and refine it into something profitable, or should the initial strategy already demonstrate a clear edge?

Bought a ~$185 rug on Amazon AU from a Marketplace seller. The listing shows a cream rug, but the rug I received is clearly grey. I sent comparison photos to both the seller and Amazon.

The seller initially increased their partial refund offers ($9 → $28 → $60), but has now stopped at $60. They also keep sending long, strange messages instead of simply resolving the issue.

I opened an A-to-z claim, but it feels like I'm stuck on a merry-go-round. Amazon says they're waiting on the seller, then the seller says they're waiting on me, and the claim has already been closed and reopened multiple times.

Amazon's emails are also confusing. They vaguely say to return the rug and that I may have return shipping reimbursed, but don't clearly confirm I'll receive a full refund. They also say the seller provided a prepaid return label, but there is no label in my account or emails, and the seller has never sent one—only a return address.

Has anyone dealt with something like this? What would you do in my situation?

I rent but I'd like to put up some screening along this side of the deck to block the neighbours looking into our deck. Any ideas how I could put some screening up that's not going to break renting rules? The left side is the hard side to fix the screening to, the right side I could achieve with cable ties even.

I'm thinking of just using Euro-reed/bamboo screening but open to any ideas.

https://preview.redd.it/u36rmfs0p78h1.jpg?width=3264&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=d71af85fd390dc47a6385ec7c474128163e69a8c

https://preview.redd.it/wsex7qu1p78h1.jpg?width=2448&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=b908e962a466541919148bcf7e600c95afec7f95

I'm driving from Bundaberg to Bathurst. Doing it in a small old hatchback Nissan Tiida. What's the easiest drive for such a car? Easy is preferred even if it takes a little longer to get there.

Is New England highway the way to go? Or is the further western highway via Goondiwindi, Dubbo, Orange then Bathurst better?