Metrics at a glance
Every card, strategy page and portfolio shows the same twelve or thirteen numbers; this page explains what each one says, which ones matter most, and why some of them look absurdly large.
Take Von Lohengramm T7 - BTCUSD, one of the BTC strategies. Its card says CAGR +120.0%, Return +1080225% and Max DD 42.9%. Read in plain words: the simulated account grew on average 120% a year from 2015 to October 2026, it ended more than ten thousand times bigger than it started, and at its worst moment it was 42.9% below its previous high.
Those three numbers already tell most of the story: how fast it grew, how much in total, and how much pain it took along the way. The rest of the metrics refine that picture. All of them describe a backtest, a replay of fixed rules on past prices (see How the backtests are built). None of them is a forecast.
Why the numbers get so big
Every account line in the app starts at 100, yet the Equity chart of Von Lohengramm T7 climbs past 1M. Nothing is wrong with the axis. Each trade starts with whatever the previous ones left behind: its second trade alone turned about 97 into about 6,260 while BTC went from roughly 230 to 14,900 dollars, and every later gain was applied to that larger amount. "+1080225%" simply means 100 became roughly 1,080,325.
The 100 is not dollars or euros, just a starting point that makes percentages easy to read; if you'd put 1,000 in, multiply everything by 10. Click LOG above the chart to see the early years properly. Return and CAGR walks through the first trades one by one.
These huge figures come mostly from BTC's rise from a few hundred dollars in 2015 to around 100,000. Simply buying and holding BTC turned 100 into about 29,600 over the same period. Use the numbers to compare strategies with each other and with Buy & Hold, not to estimate what you'd earn from here.
Where you see them
- Strategy cards show twelve numbers with short labels. Hover over a label for a one-line explanation.
- The strategy page, under Performance, shows thirteen with full names. The extra one is a second drawdown, Trade max DD, and the usual Max DD is labelled Equity max DD there so you can tell the two apart.
- Portfolio cards and boards show the same set, worked out on the portfolio's combined account line.
[The thirteen numbers on a strategy page. Note the two drawdowns: 1. the worst loss inside a single trade, 15.5%, and 2. the worst fall of the whole account from its high, 42.9%.]
All of them follow the dates you choose. Click 3Y, or set a start and end and click Apply range, and every number is worked out again for just that stretch. On the free version, they're worked out up to the free cutoff date, three months back, so they differ a little from a member's: on the free version Von Lohengramm T7 shows 15 trades and a CAGR of 119.2%, because its sixteenth trade happened after the cutoff.
The metrics in one table
"Middle half here" is the range covering the middle 50% of all published strategies, over their full history. It gives you a sense of scale, not a target.
| Metric | What it tells you | Better is | Middle half here | Von Lohengramm T7 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Return | Total growth over the window | Higher | Very large | +1080225% |
| CAGR | The same growth as an average yearly rate | Higher | 68% to 120% | +120.0% |
| Max DD | Worst fall from a previous high | Lower | 40% to 62% | 42.9% |
| Trade max DD | Worst loss inside a single trade | Lower | 15% to 32% | 15.5% |
| Sharpe | Growth per unit of ups and downs | Higher | 1.18 to 1.56 | 1.80 |
| Sortino | Like Sharpe, but only the downs count | Higher | 2.35 to 3.25 | 3.62 |
| Calmar | Yearly growth divided by the worst fall | Higher | 1.31 to 2.68 | 2.80 |
| Omega | All gains divided by all losses | Higher | 1.72 to 2.06 | 2.20 |
| PF (profit factor) | Money won on winners divided by money lost on losers | Higher | 3.5 to 12.9 | 15.35 |
| Worst | The single worst finished trade | Closer to 0 | −25% to −11% | −7.5% |
| Win | Share of trades that made money | Higher, but never alone | 50% to 77% | 68.8% |
| TiM (time in market) | Share of the time the account held a position | Neither | 52% to 63% | 61.1% |
| Trades | Number of finished trades | Neither | 5 to 16 | 16 |
Each group has its own page with examples and the exact formulas:
- Return and CAGR: how much it grew.
- Drawdown: how deep the falls were.
- Sharpe, Sortino, Omega and Calmar: growth compared with the bumpiness of the ride.
- Trade statistics: profit factor, worst trade, win rate, time in market and trades.
Which ones to look at first
If you only read three, read CAGR, Max DD and Trades, and compare them with the blue Buy & Hold line on the strategy's Equity chart for the same market.
CAGR against Max DD is the basic trade-off: how fast it grew against how much it hurt. Ask yourself honestly whether you'd have held on through a 42.9% fall with real money. Trades tells you how much evidence there is. Most strategies here made between 5 and 16 trades since 2015; with that few, a win rate or profit factor can swing a lot on one trade.
The ratios (Sharpe, Sortino, Calmar, Omega) are useful for ranking strategies that look similar on the first three. Use the Sort by menu in a folder to do that.
Special values
| You see | It means |
|---|---|
| – | Can't be worked out for this window: too few bars, no finished trades, or a division by zero. It never means zero. |
| ∞ | Profit factor or Omega with no losses at all in the window. Not a score to rank by. |
| A drawdown without a minus sign, like 42.9% | Drawdowns are shown as positive sizes. 42.9% means 42.9% below the previous high. |
Portfolios are a little different
A portfolio's numbers are worked out on its combined account line, the one on its Equity chart. They aren't averages of the strategies inside. Four Pillars Index [GPS], which mixes strategies across crypto, chip stocks, BTC DCA and gold, shows CAGR +99.8% with a Max DD of 29.8%, a shallower worst fall than almost any single strategy in it.
PF, Worst and Win show "–" on portfolios, because a portfolio doesn't have single trades that win or lose. Trades counts every exit by any strategy in the mix, and TiM counts the time any part of the account held a position, which is why it's often 100%.