Backtesting & results
Reading your results
What the equity curve and the headline metrics mean, where funding and the risk policy show up, and how to read the numbers together rather than chasing one of them.
Updated 2026-09-19·Rev. 2026.09
A backtest gives you an equity curve and a set of metrics. Read them together — no single number tells the whole story.
Equity curve
Account value over time. Look at its shape, not just the endpoint: a smooth rise survives real trading better than a jagged one that happens to end high. A curve that's flat then spikes is usually one lucky trade, not an edge.
The shaded region is drawdown — every stretch where the account sits below its prior peak. Its deepest point is your max drawdown: the worst peak-to-trough loss you'd have endured to earn this result.
The headline metrics
| Metric | What it tells you |
|---|---|
| Total PnL | Final equity minus starting capital, with the return in % beneath it. Fees and funding are already taken out. |
| Win Rate | Share of trades that closed green. High win rate with tiny wins and huge losses is a trap. |
| Profit Factor | Gross profit ÷ gross loss. Above 1 means winners outweigh losers. |
| Max Drawdown | The largest peak-to-trough drop — the worst pain you'd have sat through. |
More metrics (on a deep run, the full metrics grid) holds the rest: Sharpe (return per unit of volatility), Sortino, Calmar, CAGR, Expectancy, R/R Ratio, Recovery, average win and loss, and Trades — how many trades produced the result. A handful of trades isn't statistically meaningful.
Two more cells appear only when they apply:
| Metric | When it appears | What it tells you |
|---|---|---|
| Funding | Futures runs | Perpetual funding the closed trades paid (−) or received (+). It's already inside their PnL, so it isn't an extra charge. See funding. |
| Risk policy | Runs with a risk policy | The state the account ended in (Active, Reduced, Reduce-only or Halted), the deepest fall from the peak, and how many entries the rails downsized or refused. |
Read them as a set
A high return with a brutal drawdown may be untradeable. A modest return with a shallow drawdown and enough trades is often the better strategy. Always weigh return against the drawdown you'd endure.
How each trade closed
The Trade log names every trade's exit. Most exits are your strategy's own (Exit, Stop loss, Take profit, Trailing stop, Reduce). Three come from the account instead:
| Exit | What happened |
|---|---|
| Liquidated | The margin balance fell to the maintenance margin, and the position was closed at the liquidation price with a fee. See when a position is liquidated. |
| Bankrupt | In cash mode, which is never liquidated, a short lost everything the account held. |
| Risk halt | The risk policy's hard drawdown closed the position at the next bar's open. Nothing traded after. |
On a futures run, hover a trade's PnL to see the funding it includes.
Notices on the run
When something changes how a result should be read, a notice appears on the Backtest panel's header. Open it for the detail:
- "… liquidated": how many positions were liquidated, the price they were judged on, and where the maintenance margin came from.
- "Maintenance margin is approximate": Binance's leverage brackets couldn't be read, so liquidation used a simpler rule.
- "Funding was not charged": the pair's funding history couldn't be loaded, so the result leaves funding out.
- "Hard drawdown halted this run …": the risk policy stopped trading, and the flat end of the curve is by design.
- Refused and rejected entries: on a quick or deep run, entries refused by the risk policy are counted separately from orders the exchange would have rejected, and each one gives its reason. A run the risk policy halts can refuse an entry on every signal after the halt. The counts always cover the whole run, but the list stops at the first 200 entries and says how many more there were.
To check the assumptions behind a run, hover Backtest settings in the Builder's bottom panel. It lists the settings applied (fees, slippage, margin, sizing), and clicking it opens them for editing. A portfolio report records what each leg ran with in its Settings panel — see portfolios.
Replay it candle-by-candle
For a deeper look, step through the run in the simulation playback — watch where entries and exits fired against the chart. It's the fastest way to see why a trade happened and whether the logic matched your intent.
These metrics describe one history
Every number on this page is a description of the window you tested. None of them can tell you whether that window was representative or flattering — a Sharpe of 2.0 earned in one lucky quarter and a Sharpe of 2.0 earned across every regime look identical here.
That question has its own card: the Edge Report runs eight checks that each try to break the result a different way, and reports whether it broke.
See the glossary for precise definitions of each metric.
Next: margin, liquidation, and funding — the account rules behind a leveraged or futures result.