Running a strategy over historical data to estimate how it would have performed.
Last verified 13 September 2026 · written by the DexLadder team
What it means
Running a strategy over historical data to estimate how it would have performed.
Why it matters when you trade
A backtest is a hypothesis test, not a forecast, and it is trivially easy to fool yourself: look-ahead bias, survivorship in the asset list, ignoring fees, funding and slippage, and above all fitting parameters until the curve looks good. The discipline is to fix the rules first, test them once, and then hold out data the model has never seen.
Worked example
A strategy showing 120% a year before costs, trading 400 times at 0.1% taker plus 0.15% average slippage, gives back roughly 100 percentage points.
See it on live markets
DexLadder runs backtesting against live market and pool data, with simulated capital, so you can watch it act on an order instead of reading about it — no account, no wallet, nothing installed.