Read a backtest report
How to interpret every panel of the results view.
A results view has a lot on it. This guide is the reading order that stops you fooling yourself: risk before reward, sample size before everything.
1. Start with the risk, not the return#
The largest peak to trough equity drop is the pain you'd have had to sit through. Ask honestly: could you hold through it live? If not, the return doesn't matter.
Under ~30 trades, treat every other number as noisy. A dazzling return on 6 trades is a coin flip, not an edge.
Total return tells you the reward; Sharpe (or Sortino) tells you how much risk bought it.
See the full definitions in the Metrics reference.
2. Read the trade quality#
Win rate alone is meaningless. Pair it with the payoff ratio. A 40% win rate with big winners can beat a 70% win rate with small ones. Expectancy (in R) is the single number that combines both.
3. Look at the chart and ledger#
The annotated chart shows entries and exits on price plus the equity and drawdown curves. The trade ledger lists every trade with its R multiple. Scan it for whether a handful of outliers carried the whole result.
4. Check the honesty signals#
The header shows a Reproducible chip (same query ⇒ same test) and, when a hold out split exists, an always on out of sample verdict. If the overfitting aware statistics are present, read them: a big Deflated Sharpe drop from the raw Sharpe means the result was mostly search luck.
Use the letter grade to triage which runs deserve a closer look, then validate the survivors.
Go deeper with the Analysis & export reference.