I don't think you ever accepted drawdown. I bet you ended each backtest at the highest equity high, and started drawing down immediately, and I bet it wasn't that you didn't have an edge, but that you weren't ready for rule based strategy trading. It's psychological, but when you accept losses, as long as they're not out of backtested norms or reasonable statistical variance you can continue to trade confidently. And benchmarking yourself keeps trading performance in perspective. A cushion of outperformance, that is to say, making a few trades with no profit while the market declines 20% might be preferrable to a small cushion of profits that allow you to take larger risks going forward. Furthermore, if you weren't backtesting at the portfolio level, you weren't really backtesting.