The strategy page
Click a strategy's name and you get the full picture: every buy and sell on the price chart, the account it produced against simply holding, thirteen numbers and the complete list of trades.
The strategy page answers two questions the card can only hint at. When did the rules buy and sell? And what did that do to the account? We'll walk through it using Von Lohengramm T7 - BTCUSD, which you can open from the BTC folder.
The top of the page
[A member's view: the back arrow, the category, market and bar size, the position pill, and on the right Bookmark, Compare, the alert bell and Add to portfolio. Under the description sit six key figures.]
The pill next to the category is the position: Long (holding the market) or Flat (in cash). As a member it's today's state, from the latest finished five-day bar. The short note next to it says since when. On the free version that note reads, for example, "from 15 Jul 2026 until at least 28 Jul 2026, the end of the free version, about three months ago. It may have changed since." The pill shows the state on the cutoff date, and the strategy may well have changed its mind since. T7 actually sold on 8 October, so a member sees Flat here.
Under the name, a row of six key figures (CAGR, Total return, Equity max DD, Sharpe, Win rate and Trades) gives you the headline before you scroll. The buttons to the right of the name:
- add circle icon Add to portfolio, the gold button at the end of the row, puts the strategy on one of your own portfolios. A small Which portfolio? window lists your portfolios; pick one, or choose New portfolio to start a fresh one. If you don't have a portfolio of your own yet, it makes one called My portfolio straight away. Members only. See Create a portfolio and add strategies.
- bookmark icon Bookmark pins the strategy to the top of your lists. Members only, because bookmarks are saved to your account.
- scale icon Compare adds it to the compare tray at the bottom of the screen. More on that in Choosing strategies to follow.
- bell icon Alert e-mails you when this strategy switches between Long and Flat. It's checked once a day after the nightly data update, shortly after midnight UTC, so the e-mail arrives after the five-day bar has closed. Members only. See Alerts.
Pair strategies have one more button, the $ toggle at the start of the row; see Two-market strategies.
Just above the chart sit two tabs, Overview (everything described below) and Alerts, which explains alerts for this strategy and has a Create alert button. Next to the chart, the How it trades panel describes the rules in plain words: whether the strategy votes or follows one rule, and when it buys and steps aside.
Choosing a window
The line "Window 2015-01-01 → 2026-10-13" tells you which period everything on the page covers. The pills 1Y, 3Y, 5Y, 8Y and All change it at once; for any other period, type a Start and End and click Apply range. Stock strategies, whose data goes back further, also get a Since 2015 pill.
[Each pill redraws both charts and recalculates the numbers.]
When you change the window, both charts are cut to it, both lines restart at 100 on your start date, and all the numbers are recalculated for that stretch. The strategy itself isn't rerun; you're looking at a slice of the same stored history.
Reset, next to Apply range, goes back to the default window. The magnifier magnifier icon above the price chart is Box zoom: drag a rectangle on the chart to zoom in. It only zooms the picture, the numbers stay put. The download button next to it saves the price chart as an image.
On the free version the window ends on 20 Jul 2026, a few days before the 23 Jul cutoff. Strategies move in five-day steps, and 20 July is the start of the last bar before the cutoff, so that's where the charts stop.
The price chart
Above the chart are two view tabs, Price and Trades. Price is the chart; Trades swaps it for the trades table. The chart shows the market as candles, one per five-day bar: gold when the price closed higher than it opened, blue when it closed lower. A gold ring marks each Entry (the strategy bought) and a blue ring each Exit (it sold).
[Gold rings are buys, blue rings are sells. In the lower panel the gold line counts Long votes, the blue line Flat votes, and the dashed line is the threshold of 5.]
The smaller panel underneath shows what the rules are reading. For a vote-based strategy like T7, there are two step lines. Long votes (gold) counts how many of its nine votes say "up" on each bar; Flat votes (blue) counts how many say "step aside". The dashed line is the Threshold, here 5. When the gold line reaches 5 at a bar's close, the strategy buys at that close; when the blue line reaches 5, it sells. Watching the two lines tells you how close a strategy is to changing its mind: a gold line sitting at 4 is one vote away from a buy.
Other strategies show other things here, such as the one indicator they follow, or for a DCA plan the share of the account invested.
Click a legend item to hide or show it, drag the slider under the chart to zoom into a period, and use maximize square icon to enlarge the chart. Log graph up icon switches the price axis to a log scale, which helps over long windows.
The equity chart
Scroll past the numbers and you reach the second chart, labelled Equity. It's the account. Equity (gold) is the value of the strategy's account; Buy & Hold (blue) is the same market bought on the first day and never sold. Both start at 100. That's not dollars or euros, just a starting point: if the gold line reads 250, the rules turned 100 into 250.
[Where the gold line runs flat, the strategy was in cash.]
Where the gold line runs level, the strategy was Flat. Where it moves with the blue line, it was Long. The gap at the end tells you whether the rules beat simply holding, over this window.
Over the full history the scale climbs into the millions (1M means the account grew ten thousand times), and Buy & Hold gets squashed into a line near the bottom. Click Log graph up icon at the top of the chart: on a log scale, equal heights mean equal percentage moves, so both lines become readable. The price chart and the equity chart share this setting, and the app remembers your choice. Very large returns are written in short form, so a gain of over a million percent shows as something like "+1.1M%".
The numbers
Right under the price chart, Performance shows thirteen numbers for the current window. They're the card's twelve plus one extra drawdown, and the Metrics at a glance page explains each of them.
The two drawdowns trip people up. Equity max DD (42.9% for T7) is the deepest the whole account ever fell from a previous high, across trades and cash periods. That's the pain you'd have felt following it. Trade max DD (15.5%) is the worst any single trade sank below its buying price before it was closed. The first is bigger because it can span several losing trades in a row, and gains given back before an exit.
Keep the Trades count in mind while reading Win rate. 66.7% over 15 trades is 10 winners and 5 losers; a couple of trades either way would move it a lot.
For most strategies the numbers include no trading fee, and none of them include spreads, slippage or taxes. See How the backtests are built.
The trades table
The Trades view tab, above the chart, lists every trade in the window. Each trade has two rows sharing one number: an Entry (the buy) and an Exit (the sell).
[Trade 1 opened with the account at 100 and lost 2.93%, so trade 2 opened at about 97.]
| Column | What it shows |
|---|---|
| # | The trade number |
| Action | Entry or Exit |
| Side | Always long, since no strategy ever bets on a fall |
| Date | The bar on which the trade was filled, at the open of the bar after the signal |
| Price | The fill price |
| PnL and PnL % | On the Exit row: the profit or loss, in account units and in percent (gold for a gain, blue for a loss) |
| Equity | On the Entry row: the account's value when the trade opened |
Export CSV, next to the tabs, downloads the list as a spreadsheet, with a few extra columns.
The blurred rows on the free version
On the free version the table ends with three blurred rows, a lock and the words "Trades after 23 Jul 2026", with a See plans button. Those rows stand in for whatever the strategy did in the last three months. There might be one trade there, several, or none; the placeholder looks the same either way. A trade that was still open at the cutoff shows its Entry row but no Exit.
[Trade 16 bought on 15 Jul 2026. What happened next is behind the blurred rows; a member sees it sold on 8 Oct 2026.]
The free version's numbers stop at the same date. That's why T7 shows 119.2% a year and 15 trades there, but 120.0% and 16 trades for a member and on the Home page. If you pick a window that lies entirely in the hidden three months, the page says "This range is inside the latest 3 months, which the free version doesn't show." See Free and paid access.
If you want to follow a strategy
The app shows you what the rules did; it doesn't trade for you or tell you what to buy. If you decide to act on a strategy, you'd place the trades yourself at your own exchange or broker, and how much you put in is up to you. In the backtest, a buy puts the whole account in and a sell takes all of it out, filled at the opening price of the bar after the signal. An alert e-mail tells members when that happens.
Joining while a strategy is already Long is a judgement call. The backtest was in since the last entry, at an earlier price; you'd be buying at today's. Some people wait for the next fresh entry, others buy straight away. The rules themselves don't say.