Polarity Engine Program results

Systematic futures trading, measured in the open

Polarity Engine trades three of the major U.S. equity-index futures — YM (E-mini Dow), NQ (E-mini Nasdaq-100) and RTY (E-mini Russell 2000) — using a proprietary, fully rules-based trading system. Every entry, exit and position size is mechanical; nothing here depends on discretion or a forecast.

The system has been backtested on more than six years of minute-level market data, then held to a stricter standard than a good-looking backtest: each market’s rules were validated out-of-sample with walk-forward testing, frozen, and put into a live forward test that records every trade as it happens. What you see below is that record — updating continuously from the live program ledgers, reported as percentages of each program’s reference account and of the margin actually used.

Click here for more info — how we know these results aren’t fitted

The credibility problem with backtests

Anyone can produce a backtest with impressive numbers. With enough parameter tweaking, you can always find settings that would have made money on historical data — the results “look good” because the rules were fitted to the past, not because they capture a real edge. That’s called overfitting, or curve-fitting, and it’s why sophisticated allocators treat standalone backtest results as nearly worthless.

Our testing criteria

Every Polarity Engine program must clear four tests designed specifically to expose curve-fitting:

  • Rules registered before running — the trading rules and every parameter are committed to a version-controlled record before any simulation runs, so they can’t be quietly tuned to fit the outcome.
  • Blind first pass — the strategy runs once, untouched, at the registered settings, and the result stands whatever it is.
  • Walk-forward validation — the rules are tested on data they’ve never seen, fold by fold; that’s what the walk-forward efficiency (WFE) number on this page measures.
  • Frozen and forward-tested — after validation the parameters are locked, and a live paper-trading engine records every trade as it happens. A forward test can’t be curve-fit, because the future hasn’t happened yet.

The failures are recorded with the same rigor as the successes — a program that doesn’t meet the pre-registered bar is stopped and never reaches this page’s record at all.

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