The Fill Model Is Where Backtests Quietly Cheat

Every backtest has to answer a boring question: when the strategy says "buy," what price does it actually get? Most backtesting frameworks answer this question badly by default, and the badness is almost always in the strategy's favor. Here are the four assumptions that do the most damage, roughly in order of how often they show up. Mid-price fills If your backtest fills orders at the midpoint of the bid-ask spread, you are assuming you trade for free. You don't. A market order pays at least half the spread to cross it; a marketable limit order pays something close to that too, once you're honest about how often it actually gets hit versus sitting unfilled while the market moves away. Mid-price fills are the single most common way a backtest manufactures edge that doesn't exist, because the effect compounds with trade frequency — a strategy that trades often looks great on mid-price fills and mediocre-to-negative once it pays the spread on every round trip. Zero slippage Slippage is the gap between the price your signal fired at and the price your order actually executed at, and it's not just a queuing artifact — it's partly information. If your strategy is buying because something changed, other participants are reacting to the same thing, and the price you wanted is often gone by the time your order reaches the book. A backtest with zero slippage is quietly assuming the market waits for you. Unlimited size at the touch Backtests routinely assume you can execute your full position size at the best bid or ask, no matter how large the order is relative to the visible size there. In practice, a large order walks the book, and the average fill price is worse than the touch price by an amount that depends on how thin the book is. This one is invisible until you try to size up, which is exactly when a strategy that looked fine in testing starts bleeding. Commissions omitted or averaged Commissions and fees are usually small per trade and therefore easy to skip or fold in