New systems and historical volatility

Hi
I've been burning the candle at both ends attempting to put together a simple trading system/method, and thus far I am encouraged.
However, the method I speak of is a UJ 15 minute system, and this means I have only been able to backtest over a period of around 12 months or so. MT4 does not seem to carry more data than this for the 15m timeframe.
During the mega volatility of the latter part of last year, my method obviously performed exceptionally well. During the last few months, not quite as well but still profitably by a comfortable margin.
My question is this; Do the last 12 months represent a decent sampling period, or have the last 12 months as a whole been pretty exceptional throughout?

Thanks for any advice.

The end of last year and start of this one were exceptional.

Would you say that the last 4 or 5 months were seasonally atypical for trading conditions and volatility ranges?

The market IMHO has been pants since about April (I don't think I'm the only one who thinks this), but don't take my word for it, take a look at some longer term charts with an ATR, the volatility cycles are pretty obvious, you don't get a world wide financial meltdown every year.

Last 12/24 months have been very different than last 10 years before it. I wouldn't trust long term results based on results from last 2 years.

There is 1 min data (at least there was) for about 10 years at alpari so you might want to try find it so you can test longer period.

That sounds promising.
I'll give it a go, thanks.