How to read a track record

The equity curve is the bot's paper account value over time, plotted trade by trade. Up and to the right means the bot has been making money; flat or falling stretches are losing periods. A jagged line is normal — real trading is streaky, and a suspiciously smooth curve is usually a sign something is being hidden.

Max drawdown is the largest peak-to-valley drop the account has suffered — the worst losing stretch so far. It's the "how much pain would I have sat through?" number. A bot with strong returns but a deep drawdown may be riskier than its headline profit suggests, and future drawdowns can always be worse than past ones.

Profit factor is gross profit divided by gross loss. Above 1.0 means the bot has made more than it lost; 1.5 means $1.50 gained for every $1.00 given back. It's a useful single-number summary of edge — but check it alongside the number of trades: a great profit factor over a handful of trades means very little.

Win rate is the percentage of trades that closed profitable. On its own it's the most misleading stat in trading: a 40% win rate with big winners and small losers can be very profitable, while a 90% win rate with rare huge losses can blow up. Always read win rate together with profit factor and drawdown.

Every trade a listed bot takes is recorded as it happens — wins and losses — in an append-only, hash-chained ledger. Losses aren't a bug in the marketing; they're proof the record is real. A track record with no losing trades is a red flag, not a selling point. How the live ledger works →