by Ryan O’Connell, CFA, FRM

Over lunch the other day, a friend mentioned his brother, a professional asset manager, swears by a simple mean reversion trading strategy. His strategy consists of buying the 10 biggest losers in the stock market each day and selling them at the close of the following trading session. I asked him if he knew which index or exchange his brother used to pick his losers from, and he told me that he wasn’t certain. As a curious casual investor, I decided to put this strategy to the test using historical data and backtest the trading strategy with Python.

Disclaimer: This article is for informational and educational purposes only and is not intended to serve as personal financial advice.

What you will learn from this backtesting tutorialCopy heading link In this article, I’ll walk through the process of backtesting a daily Dow Jones mean reversion strategy using Python in Datalore notebooks. To make it accessible even for those with limited coding experience, I’ll leverage Datalore’s AI Assistant capabilities. I’ll also show how intuitive prompts can be used to create the key components of the backtest, and demonstrate Datalore’s interactive charting and reporting features to effectively analyze and share the backtest results.

To make things more challenging for myself (and easier for you), I won’t write a single line of code myself. Every line of code in this tutorial will be generated by AI as shown below: [...]