Two figures tell you more about whether you can live with a strategy than any return figure does. The worst month it has had, and the drawdown it is likely to produce, which is usually quoted as DD95.
The worst month is simple. It is the largest loss the strategy produced in a calendar month on its record, and it is the number to imagine arriving in your account in the month you least expect it. If that figure, at the risk setting you intend to use, is one you would react to by switching the strategy off, the setting is wrong for you. The reason to look at it before the return is that the return is what you get for sitting through the worst month, and only a trader who sits through it collects.
DD95 answers a harder question: not how bad it has been, but how bad it is likely to get. It comes from taking the strategy's actual trades, reshuffling their order many thousands of times, and recording the deepest drawdown each ordering produced. Ninety-five per cent of those orderings stayed inside the DD95 figure. It is larger than the historical maximum, usually by a good margin, because the history is one ordering and rarely the worst.
Read the two together. A strategy with a worst month of 6 per cent and a DD95 of 18 per cent at one setting will, over enough time, probably show you a drawdown of around 18, made of two or three bad months in a row. If you could hold 18, the setting is usable. If you could hold 10, halve the setting and the figures halve with it.
Both figures are estimates from a record that will be exceeded eventually. That is not a reason to ignore them. It is the reason to size so that exceeding them by a margin is survivable.