Tops and bottoms are arbitrary reference points with little relevance to sound strategies. Most money is made in between. You don’t have to care about them at all. You shouldn’t. You can be wrong about the low and still make money, or nail it and still lose by sizing badly, exiting early, etc. There’s so much levels to this. The best trade of your year will likely have a mediocre entry and the best call of your year might be one you never sized into. It’s a separate game with a separate, public scoreboard. So people naturally drift toward the one that gives feedback without noticing they switched games.

Targets put a ceiling on the exact thing you came here for. You showed up to this market because it produces enormous trends. And then your first instinct is to cap your upside at some arbitrary level you decided on before the move even started. You've kept all the chaos, but you've removed the payoff that justifies enduring all of it. The goal is staying in the trade as long as the trend is intact. Targets are fundamentally flawed when applied to a strategy whose edge depends on open-ended winners. With targets, you've chosen a game defined by asymmetry and then eliminated the asymmetry.

In my opinion, overfitting at its core is an attempt to scam the market out of returns and to collect the payment without carrying the risk the payment is for. Which means the whole question resolves into one distinction: is this risk compensated, or did I invent it? Compensated risk is the risk someone else wants off their book badly enough to pay you to hold it. Uncompensated risk is what you introduce yourself when you layer on a filter, tune a threshold, or carve the ugly stretch out of the backtest. So there’s very little fitting the average person can do before fucking things up, because each adjustment quietly moves you from the first category to the second (ask me how I know). The cure is, in my opinion, knowing what mechanism you’re trying to profit from and then accepting the full weight of the risk that comes attached. Including the part that hurts, especially the part that hurts. That’s the deal, that’s what you’re paid for, right? Just my uneducated opinion and how I like to view it.