Nonsense. If you want to back test, fine. But I write algos and live trade them without backtesting. What's more important is no glitches in the coding.
There's something I don't understand here as well... If the margin is set to $550 per contract, and you have $750 in account, then after entering the first contract, you'd have to be up $350 on the first contract in order to enter the second one. $550x2 is $1100. So you enter one contract, and you now have $200 margin left. Ergo, you cannot enter second contract until your open position reaches $350. In the MNQ, that one contract would have to be 175 points in the green before you could layer on a second position. I do not recall seeing that in your charts.
That's blatantly ridiculous. If you're writing an algo, you have to test it. What you're telling me is that you write a code, deploy it on a live account and then hope for the best. Sorry, it don't fly.
Shows how much you don't know! For some, possibly yourself, backtesting is trying out different time frames on indicators. "Let me try 22ma, nope, lets try 24, nope, oh maybe RSI 10, nope, dang...."
And maybe you and the OP should look up the definition of "strategy". It's a PLAN of action. You're creating something for use in the future. That means you need to know what happened in the past. The lack of analytical thinking here is astounding.
And that means you have tried over and over to make something work. And that "something" was an observation you made in the market, something that's redundant and repeatable. If you saw the same "something" hundreds of times, that's backtesting regardless even though you just looked at it.
And that says everything I need to know because if you don't understand observation and testing, you sure as hell have wasted your time.