Read a strategy card

A card fits one strategy into a tile: what it trades, whether it's holding the market, a sketch of its recent decisions and twelve numbers that sum up its history.

Cards are what you scan on the Strategies page, so it pays to know what each part is telling you, and what it isn't. Here's a member's view of Von Lohengramm T7 - BTCUSD in the BTC folder.

[The numbers match the list below. This is a member's card, so the Flat pill is today's state.]

1. The top line gives the category (here consensus, a vote among several smaller strategies), the market (BTCUSD, BTC priced in dollars) and 5D, the five-day bars every strategy is built on.
2. The Long or Flat pill is the strategy's position. Long means it holds the market, Flat means it's in cash.
3. The bookmark saves the strategy to your account and pins it to the top of every list. It's for members; on the free version it explains that and links to the plans.
4. The scales icon adds the strategy to the compare tray. It works for everyone. See Choosing strategies to follow.
5. The name opens the strategy page. The part after the dash is the market.
6. The description says in plain words what the rules look at. It's cut off after three lines; the full text is on the strategy page.
7. The mini chart sketches recent price and decisions (more below).
8. The twelve numbers sum up the backtest over the window you've chosen.

Is the pill today's position?

For members, yes: it's the state on the latest finished five-day bar. On the free version, no. It's the state on the free cutoff date, three months back, and hovering over it says so, for example "Long on 28 Jul 2026, the end of the free version, about three months ago. It may have changed since."

That difference can matter. On 21 October 2026 the free card of Von Lohengramm T7 still says Long, because it bought on 15 July. A member sees Flat: the strategy sold again on 8 October. So don't read the free pill as a cue to do anything today.

[1. The pill shows Long, the position on 23 Jul 2026. The note above the numbers says the free version ends on that date.]

The mini chart

The mini chart is a quick sketch, not the strategy's account. The top part is the market's price over the last 180 bars, about two and a half years. Gold dots mark where the strategy bought, blue dots where it sold.

The bottom strip shows what drives the decisions. For a consensus strategy that's two step lines: gold counts the votes saying "up", blue the votes saying "step aside". When gold climbs past the strategy's threshold, it buys. Other strategies show the indicator they read, and DCA plans show the share of the account invested.

The mini chart doesn't follow the window pills; only the numbers do. So a card can show strong numbers over eleven years and a mini chart ending in a slide. Both are true.

The twelve numbers

Each label has a short explanation if you hover over it, and every one is covered in more depth in Metrics at a glance. For a first look, these four tell you most of the story:

• CAGR is the average growth per year, compounded. 120% means the account more than doubled each year on average.
• Max DD is the deepest fall from a previous high. 42.9% means that at its worst moment, the account was 42.9% below its best. That's what you'd have had to sit through.
• Trades counts completed round trips (a buy and the sell after it). 16 since 2015 is normal for slow five-day rules.
• TiM, time in market, is the share of bars in which the strategy held its market. The rest of the time it was in cash. A DCA book counts as in the market whenever it holds any BTC at all, and a two-market strategy in the dollar view always shows 100%, because it always holds one of its two markets.

The others are Return (total growth over the whole window), Sharpe, Sortino, Calmar and Omega (growth weighed against how bumpy the ride was; higher is better, and above 1 is decent for Sharpe), PF (profit factor: money won on winning trades divided by money lost on losing ones), Worst (the worst single trade) and Win (the share of trades that made money).

About those enormous returns

A Return of +1,080,225% looks absurd, and as a number you'd ever earn, it is. It's what compounding 120% a year for eleven years does, in a market that went from about $300 in 2015 to a peak above $120,000 in 2025. BTC itself rose tens of thousands of percent over the same years. Think of Return as a way to compare strategies on the same market and window, not as a forecast of what €1,000 would become. Click 3Y in the folder and the numbers become much more down to earth.

Few trades means little evidence. A 66.7% win rate over 15 trades is ten winners and five losers; one more loser and it drops to 62.5%. Weigh Win, PF and Worst against the Trades count.

Why a card can disagree with another page

You may see the same strategy with slightly different numbers in three places:

The free card stops three months earlier, so a trade that ended after the cutoff isn't counted yet. And as soon as you pick a window such as 5Y, the numbers change again because they now cover five years, not eleven.

Pair cards and the $ button

Cards in the Multi-Ticker folder trade on the ratio between two markets, such as BTCUSD/SPX. They have an extra dollar minimalistic icon $ button next to the pill, which switches that card's numbers and mini chart from the ratio view to dollars. Two-market strategies explains what that means.

Related

• Browse the strategies
• The strategy page
• Metrics at a glance
• Free and paid access