For example, earlier you said: These kinds of queries are overfit city. You tweak enough filters and it looks like you're printing money in the backtest, but it's nonsense without any predictive power. If your customers don't understand this they are going to be pissed at you when they lose money. You are explicitly targeting non technical people who can't code, and thus less likely to be statistically literate. I think if you offer up such overfitting power you have a responsibility to inform people about the dangers of this.
And if NinjaTrader sells itself to a broker or just changes policy for whatever reason? Best option is to not tie yourself to anything besides a language.
you didnt provide any examples or specifics. The example above is an example for a strategy that is based on a criteria, for exmaple trading only cmps below a $500M mkt-cap. how is that overfitting ? It's like saying "I only trade AAPL"
There are an infinite number of combinations of moving averages, vwap, spike percentages and all the other things you mentioned. If you search through these combinations, some of them are going to have amazingly good backtests just by chance even though there is no real actual edge. That's called overfitting. Knowing how to avoid overfitting is not easy. Many will fall into the trap, especially if they are statistically naive, and if it is encouraged by the design of the tool.
How would you know if a strategy is profitable in the first place? You can discover through data, it doesn't have to be just optimization.
One that isn't curve fitted, which most optimized strats are IMO. However, I'll grant that codes can help speed up the process of finding one. But my bone of contention is that many think that coding is synonymous with trading. Running a bunch of scripts won't magically give you a money-making ATM.
From what I've understood, that's not far off what Renaissance is doing. Granted, they use a scientifically rigorous method of testing most likely. I mostly agree that programmers that go into trading thinking they'll be millionaires quick due to their present skills are misled.
You don't know either how many outside of ET program or not. So the conclusion is that neither me or you know anything to make a profound analysis and a well argumented conclusion. To me: the moment you use a PC you need programming skills. Maybe on a low level but even in Excel you have to create formulas to get results. So you need knowledge of the syntaxes you can use and the logic on how to build that formula. The only exception is just drawing lines thru tops and bottoms. But if you use Gann angles, retracement percentages or Fibonacci you are already using code.