[Thread] ⚠️ Small warning about Bots/automated strategies on TradingView - even if you're not a developer some of you may be thinking of subscribing to someone's paid-for bot after seeing their apparently impressive results, you should read this first..

#bots #tradingview #ats

I've done fairly extensive research here: T.V.s backtester is a bit buggy making its backtest results questionable. These bugs can manifest in many spurious 'false positives' here's what I've found:

#1 Heikin-Ashi; this is a well known problem. HA candles can be useful in a bot's algo. But their Open & Close price is not the same as the *real* O & C and it's the HA values which T.V. uses to calculate profit & loss. It can be wildly wrong and produce runaway false positives.

#2 PineScript v2 bug I came across this while developing, explained by another T.V. user here (it was fixed in v3, make sure you use that):

#3 Erratic timestamps. I've seen the entry/exit times in a 4H UTC chart offset by 1h e.g. 9am instead of 8am which should be impossible. I've even seen weird timestamps like 09:10am on hourly-based charts. Sometimes it disappears after changing settings. Weird behaviour = Warning

#4 Erratic PnL: I've seen the exact same trades with identical entries and exits produce varying PnL. Sometimes it shows a win, sometimes a loss, sometimes differing amounts, it doesn't make any sense.

#5 "Repainting": Not sure if this is a duplicate of #2 bug but some indicators - effectively - see into the future (lol?) and produce false positives. Double check your results by using the 'Replay' feature and step through the chart history candle by candle. You may be surprised

#6 "Contracts" if you specify Order Size in %Equity internally it still seems to use contracts - unsure what that means exactly. But your %PnL is effected and it shouldn't be. Workaround is to use higher starting capital. i.e. use 100k instead of 10k and see the %PnL difference.

The only way to be *absolutely sure* your backtest is accurate is to manually 'replay' the chart candle by candle, note down the entry/exit times and candle OHLC and use a spreadsheet or something to manually calculate PnL according to your algorithm...what a a PITA.

....Or use something other than Trading View to design your algo/bot. There are other options out there;
Backtrader (Python), @QuantConnect, Gekko (Javascript) etc. and tons more to investigate.

In conclusion; there are legit T.V. bots out there which are great and work as advertised (@Fibonacci30 has one I can vouch for). But it's worth doing your research first before paying, ask for a trial first or to see the bot's forward-tested performance.

Trading View are aware of at least one of these problems, here's the response I got from their support ticket centre when I brought up the Heikin-Ashi candle problem, a good start.

[Note on HA candles - these dodgy calculations aren't too much of an issue on longer trades (swing / positional)]

#7 Another issue I forgot about, their Trailing Stop feature is complete bullshit:

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