Avoiding Overfitting Ray Robot II

Ray Robot II and I have just been called a variety of names over on a LinkedIn thread started by Marcos López de Prado and entitled "Pseudo-Mathematics and Financial Charlatanism". As best as I can work out Guy Fleury has suffered a total sense of humour failure, and his view can be summarised as:

I remember having to wait about nine months for Ray's inevitable demise while you were praising day in and day out the prowess exhibited by your KISS randomly trading robot. When Ray blew up, which is equivalent of having lost all the money in the trading account, you gave it an educational spin. Sure… And here you are at it again.

and

You've promoted the KISS principle for some time, maybe it's time you start looking at more complicated trading structures.

For the uninitiated KISS stands for "Keep It Simple Stupid". I will happily admit that Ray Robot Jr. is simple, and his late lamented father, Ray the Random Robot, was "stupid" by design. The Son of Ray and I cannot possibly allow this wholly unwarranted slur on Ray Senior's good name to pass unchallenged. Earlier this morning I logged in to our "City of London" VPS and ran a backtest of RR2 over the same period of time that he has been live trading a spreadbet account at GKFX Spread Trading. Here is a screenshot of what was revealed to me by MetaTrader 4 version 4.00 build 625:

Screenshot revealing Ray Robot II's simulated equity curve from November 13th 2011 until April 19th 2014

Here is another graph also produced by MetaTrader 4 earlier this morning, revealing Ray's actual live trading equity curve:

Screenshot revealing Ray Robot II's live trading equity curve from November 13th 2011 until April 19th 2014

Would anyone care to play "spot the difference" with Ray Junior and I? If, unlike Guy, you would care to experiment with Ray for yourself, here is a little package we put together many moons ago that contains Ray's MQL4 source code amongst other things.