Has anyone backtested over 500 trades and gotten a PF above 1.5?

It happens, but over 500+ trades a 1.5 usually comes from one of three places, so rule them out before believing it. Costs first. A lot of TradingView tests run with zero commission and zero slippage. On futures, a tick of slippage each side on a short-hold strategy can eat most of the edge by itself. Set both before you compare anything. Then how many variants you tried. If you tested 40 ideas and the best one hit 1.5, that can be what luck alone hands you at the top of 40. Freeze it and run it on a stretch of data you never looked at. Then fills. Entering on the close of the signal bar, or intrabar stops and targets with bar magnifier off, makes a test look better than it trades. Slower systems, holding hours to days, have an easier time because costs are a small slice of each trade. And 1.0 to 1.3 over a big sample is a normal result, not a failed search.

those three filters kill most promising backtests stone dead. costs alone flipped a 1.4 PF system i was playing with to a 1.1 the variant thing is the sneaky one. people run 50 tweaks pick the best and call it a 1.5 strategy when it's just curve fitting. out of sample test or it didn't happen

(Disclaimer, I am not a regular backtester, and do not typically like backtesting) Yes, I have multiple times, but the problem with those tests is that when I removed the top 1% of trades, the results went back to breakeven. The good results entirely came from the strategy being well-positioned to capture some sort of big tail event, that I would have never anticipated at the time, and have no reason to expect will happen again. That's why it's important to dig deeper into backtest results than just the headline stats. If your strategy is breakeven over ten years except for the one time it happened to be long bitcoin into the 2024 election and made 150R (that you probably would have never held through anyways), it's more "right place right time" than real edge.

yes, possible but very unlikely.