Why we built this
SkewLab was born from hands-on experience building professional trading systems and portfolio-management tools — the kind normally reserved for institutions, quantitative funds and desks with dedicated engineering teams.
The idea is simple: bring those same methods directly to people. Instead of a black box that tells you what to buy, SkewLab gives you the workbench professionals use — so you can validate your own intuitions, or build a strategy from scratch, using rigorous methodology rather than guesswork. No code required, but no shortcuts on the quality of the analysis underneath.
Why backtest before you invest
Most people who lose money in the markets do so for a predictable reason: they act on an idea that was never tested. It feels right, so they trade it. The market is an expensive place to discover that an idea doesn't work.
Backtesting flips that order. Before you risk a single euro, you run your strategy against years of historical data and see how it would actually have behaved — through good years and bad, through crashes and recoveries. You get numbers instead of feelings: how often it wins, how deep it falls, how long it stays underwater, how it compares to simply holding the market.
The goal isn't to find a strategy that looks perfect. It's to understand what you're really dealing with before it costs you.
The most valuable outcome is often "no"
This is the part that's hard to accept: the best result a backtest can give you is frequently to invalidate your idea.
Discovering on screen that a strategy loses money, or only worked in one lucky period, or carries a drawdown you could never stomach in real life — that discovery is worth a great deal. It costs you a few minutes and zero capital. The same lesson learned live costs you real money and, often, the confidence to keep going.
A strategy you rejected after testing is not a failure. It's a loss you didn't take.
The mistakes backtesting helps you avoid
Testing properly means confronting the traps that make backtests lie. SkewLab is built around avoiding them:
Survivorship bias — testing only on companies that still exist today ignores all the ones that failed, flattering your results. Our US equity data includes delisted companies; where a dataset can't (European equities today), we tell you, so you know what you're standing on.
Lookahead bias — accidentally using information that wasn't available at the time. A backtest that "knows the future" produces beautiful, worthless results. Our engine is built to prevent it.
Overfitting — tuning a strategy so tightly to the past that it captures noise instead of signal, then falls apart on new data. Tools like walk-forward testing, temporal robustness and Monte Carlo exist precisely to expose a strategy that only works in hindsight.
Confusing luck with skill — one good historical run proves nothing. That's why SkewLab lets you stress-test through real crises (dot-com, 2008, the European debt crisis, Covid) and resample thousands of alternative outcomes, so you see the range of what could happen, not a single flattering path.
Ignoring the cost of drawdown — a strategy with great returns on paper is useless if its worst losing streak would have made you quit halfway. Seeing that streak in advance is the difference between a plan you can follow and one you'll abandon at the worst moment.
What SkewLab is — and isn't
SkewLab is a research and analysis tool. It gives you professional methodology in an accessible form. It does not give investment advice, tell you what to buy, or promise returns. What you build and what you decide is yours — the point is to let you decide with evidence instead of hope.
Markets carry real risk, and no backtest can guarantee the future. But testing before you act, honestly and rigorously, is the single biggest edge most private investors never use. That edge is what we set out to put in your hands.
SkewLab is operated by BoGames Software Ltd, a company registered in England and Wales under company number 17100237.
Registered office: 71-75 Shelton Street, Covent Garden, London, WC2H 9JQ, United Kingdom.
Contact: hello@skewlab.io